The Architect of Aeons (21 page)

He paused to let that sink in.

“Hell, Blackie, you read the blueprints for their skyhooks written there. Their fighting machines. Is that the kind of thing anyone shows someone you plan to invade?”

Del Azarchel was speechless. For a mind of his speed, a half-second of silence was like being dumbfounded for half a minute.

Montrose said, “And the Monument was not a First Contact message.”

“How do you know?” Del Azarchel said softly.

“There is no information about the Monument Builders anywhere in the messages or maps or legal equations or anything. No signature. Not the slightest clue. Or maybe one clue: whoever secretly towed the positive matter gas giant Thrymheim into orbit around a negative matter star is a different group from Hyades, or whoever openly placed that star there. The Monument Builders do not want to make contact with us, first or any,” Montrose said with emphasis. “No, Blackie. The Monument was meant for something else.”

On the visual channel, Montrose could see Del Azarchel's face from his inner mask camera. For perhaps the first time in thousands of years, Del Azarchel was wearing a look of honest curiosity on his face, the look a man gets only when speaking with his equals, hearing some new thoughts about his own area of expertise from another expert.

And perhaps there was a sneaking glint of admiration for Montrose hidden in the expression. He said only: “Meant for what?”

“To send Rania to M3,” said Montrose.

On the visual channel, the expression metamorphosed into Del Azarchel's wonted look to disdainful calm. He had regained his self-possession; his face once more was a mask. But his voice still betrayed an echo of awed curiosity. “But why? To what end?”

“That is what Rania will tell us when she gets back.”

“If we survive,” said Del Azarchel wryly, once more his cold and smiling self. “Time flies. Shall we get on with it? I have centuries of practice at savantry, whereas you are unnaturally reluctant to make a copy of your brain. Afraid of going mad again, are we? Afraid of being two people? I will be happy to handle the matter myself, without your aid.”

Del Azarchel now flexed his cable to pull him the other way across the vast width of the axis chamber. Montrose called up a transparent overlay. He saw where, at some point in time not reflected on the ship's growth chart (for its cabins and chambers were continuously being rebuilt and replaced over the decades and centuries), Del Azarchel had installed a savant chamber for brain-to-xypotech uploading. Montrose could not tell if this had been done in the three days since leaving the moon, or years before.

Del Azarchel slid away, light as a fish in the zero gravity, passing one bulkhead after another, heading for the savantry chamber. “You hesitate, even now? The kenosis of Tellus buried in the crystal is even now waiting for us to become visible to him, so we can talk. If all those colonists die, is not Rania's mission in vain? Are we not proved by events to be too shortsighted, too parochial, too savage, too foolish to be a starfaring race—too damned
stupid
for the—?”

At that point, the voice line was cut. Montrose looked through pinpoint cameras in the bulkhead and saw that Del Azarchel had pressurized the savantry chamber and taken off his air hood. The chamber was cylindrical, with a surgical cocoon opened wide like a strange white rose made of antiseptic blood-absorption pads on one end, and a cluster of scalpels, bone saws, intravenous feeds like the teeth of a shark ringing the rim of the brain surgery helmet at the other. The Spaniard was smiling, and his breath came in clouds from his white teeth. The atmosphere in the chamber had not had time to warm up to life-support standards, and Del Azarchel might not bother powering up the heating circuits, since temperatures too cold for bacteria to thrive might be more sterile.

But he knew what Del Azarchel had said after the line was off.
Too damned stupid for the stars.

That was what this was all about, wasn't it?

Montrose muttered a set of imprecations involving rotting diseases and reproductive organs as he pulled himself hand over hand to an unoccupied bay, and selected from the design templates to build a savantry chamber of his own. He set the three-dimensional lathes and molecular printer tubs to work. It would take hours to prepare the chamber for brain surgery.

He had time to kill. So Montrose went aft to the Physical Therapy Bay, inflated it, pumped in air and heat and light, doffed his shipsuit, and spent the time tethered to a zero-gee punching bag, driving roundhouses and uppercuts and snap-kicks into the leathery bag, and bouncing like a yo-yo on the end of his elastic tether with each blow. The anger in him slowly subsided as if departing with his concentric clouds of sweat.

4. Stupidity

A.D. 11061

The first thing he remembered after the confusion and delirium had passed was a sense of shame.
How could I have been so pestiferous jackassularish stupid?

Dreams had overwhelmed him, image after image. Glowing figures crowned with light bent over a dark well at whose bottom stars were shining; Rania winged like an angel and soaring; swarms of dark, angular creatures picking their way, crablike, across spiderwebs strung between star and star; a screaming queen chained to a sea cliff, and at her feet the jaws of a sea monster running with salt water, the nostrils in its skull blowing steam; his dry-eyed and hard-eyed mother talking to the photograph of his father; a burning house whose sparks spread from garden to wood to field and grassland, until all the world between the sea and sky was a mass of beating inferno, roaring and red, and black ash below and black smoke above conquered all the continents, halted only at the verge of the steaming sea.

Another set of dreams hovered in another level of his consciousness.

One dream held images of Del Azarchel and Rania moving men on a chessboard, and Del Azarchel, with a smile, tossing chessmen one after another into the path of the enemy queen, tempting her into a position far from the central squares of the board. Except that the chessboard was the silver lines and jet-black expanse of the Monument, curves and angles of alien mathematical codes.

A second dream-image showed Menelaus stepping (without his pants) into the salon of some Hindi or Blondy gentleman's club. Del Azarchel was wearing white tie and tails, seated in a wingback chair, his head bent close to the superhuman and regal figure dressed in emeralds and sea-blue silk and crowned with a circle of clouds. The two were whispering together. When Menelaus, naked, stepped into the suddenly silent room, he realized the regal figure was horse from the waist down.

The cloud-crowned figure arose. His goateed face was a match for Del Azarchel's. Montrose recognized the dappled flanks and white socks of his horse, Res Ipsa, on whose template Pellucid had been based. He stood with his front hoof resting lightly on the North Pole of Earth's globe, with her ocean-covered poles and the new shapes of continents, hanging between a dark circle and a bright, symbols of the orbital mirrors.

“Pellucid…?” Montrose whispered the name, and then winced at the note of absurd hope in his voice.

“Ah,” said Del Azarchel, standing from his chair. “At last the Cowhand wakes. Physically, we are near Jupiter. Mentally, we are occupying the same logic diamond, which has grown to fill most of the ship, occupied by a kenosis, a downloaded version, of Tellus. You slept for over twelve months.”

“Is this real?” Montrose either asked aloud or thought silently. The dream image was cartoonish and flat. At the same time, Montrose was aware of another level of his mind, the level where the dream-images were being compiled.

Another dream-image came: he saw a mansion of many rooms and corridors, wings and colonnaded walks, enclosed sunny courtyards where mirror-basined fountains lofted plumes of foam to sprinkle ranks and hedges and mazes of rosebush, while above rose towers and observatories. But the walls and floors were of clear glass. To either side were library stacks of books, tomes, librums, scrolls, grimoires, enchiridions, over which monks toiled with pen and ink. The stacks descended stair beneath stair and ladder beneath ladder into a subterranean vastness. Through floors like clouds he could see in the lower basements where hidden and antic gnomes were toiling; and torture chambers where men with his big-nosed gargoyle face screamed. Meanwhile, in the towers above, other men, also wearing his face, paced the balconies and counted the stars, and all the towers were wrapped in opium smoke that issued from athanors and alchemical furnaces.

The mansion was his mind; the torture chambers his buried guilt and fear; the workshops of gnomes were the subconscious processes usurping all his attention, the attempts of the mind to encode the jarring maelstrom of raw sense data into images and forms his emotions and his reason could comprehend.

“The question of reality is often over-pondered,” said Del Azarchel heavily, his voice coming from another scene. “I have erected a sensorium to accommodate your virtual sense impressions, until such time, assuming you can manage it, you pass beyond the need for concrete visualizations. But wait—you are not seeing what I am presenting? The virtual brainwave patterns of your virtual brain show you are still in REM sleep.”

One of the gnomes handed him an alarm clock. It was another image, a reminder of the time when he heard a fire alarm or screaming maiden in a dream, and woke to find himself clubbing his alarm clock with the folding baton he slept with under his pillow. (That was before he learned to sleep with his alarm clock parked across the room.) The gnome was merely an image meant to show him the situation: the virtual reality Del Azarchel offered was being interpreted or misinterpreted through the subconscious layers of his mind.

It was a simple matter to turn like a swimmer in the ocean of his thoughts and crash through to the surface. He drew a breath and found the air was missing. Del Azarchel was not running any false sensations of the mouth and nose, or even of the body at all. The simulation was merely a set of screens containing various information. One of them was a cartoon image of Del Azarchel's facial expressions. Another showed several viewpoints around the ship, including his body in one medical coffin and Del Azarchel's resting in another.

Montrose turned to thank the gnome, but it explained that it was merely a dream image as well. “I am not quite awake yet. Where am I? Are there two of me, or one? Is that me?”

The version of his mind in the ship's brain made a cartoon arm to point at the image he saw of himself in the medical coffin. His mind seemed to have no location.

Of course, minds never really had location, but Montrose was comfortable with imagining himself an inch or two behind his own eyes, staring out as if through windows. Now, he had no sense of front or back, up or down. It made him seasick. Then he saw that his inner ear was a virtual simulation, a set of numbers describing the motions of his nervous system and connected glands and organs, so he could shut off the neural sensation of dizziness.

“You are still half-asleep,” said Del Azarchel, with the hint of an impatient sigh, but also, from another aural channel, the hint of a dry chuckle of amusement. Not being limited to one voice box, he could make any noises he wished to communicate anything he wished. “I would shock you awake, but Tellus will not allow me.”

Montrose saw the interface controlling his coffin, saw the neural and chemical balances, and ordered the coffin to inject him with just enough of a stimulant to wake him.

But wait—how could he be
there
when he was
here
? There was a copy of his mind in the ship's brain, but a biological copy still inside his skull in his head in his coffin. Then he saw the thick helmet of golden-red logic crystal surrounding his now-bald head, and saw the bones of his skull had been replaced by a substance transparent to various useful frequencies, even if it were opaque to normal vision. He saw the continual information flow passing from the smaller human brain into the larger virtual brain. At the moment, both brains were synchronized.

In his present state, it seemed a long time for the biological nervous system to react to the stimulant. He saw his eyes open in the coffin. He also saw—with those eyes—nothing but darkness. He waved his hand at the internal coffin controls to bring up the inside lights, but before the nerve impulse traveled from brain to hand, he realized it was easier merely to retool various areas of the crystal hemisphere now crowning his head to light-sensitive appliances. His vision was more precise and covered more bands of the electromagnetic spectrum than his eyes, and also encountered the odd sensation of looking at the inside of the coffin in front of his nose, to either side of his ears, above the top of his head, as well as inspecting the surface of the hard pillow on which his head rested.

Rested? The coffin was in a small inflatable bay clinging to the inside of the main carousel, which was under power, and spinning him and the room about roughly half a gravity. The human body was not designed to rest and recuperate in free fall, despite the clever modifications made to Elder bodies. Someone had thoughtfully moved him to a chamber with weight.

Montrose climbed out of the coffin, put a bag to his mouth and nose, and spewed up the fluid in his lungs and stomach.

“I slept for a year?” Montrose said aloud.

“That is what sleep is for, I suppose,” Montrose answered himself using speakers built into the overhead. For a moment, he was confused, because again he was watching himself from the outside, through medical sensors and pinpoint cameras on the bulkhead.

Had he been talking to himself, or was this a case of the two halves of himself talking to each other?

Through the crystal floor of the imaginary mansion of his mind or minds, he could see the information feeds writing the subconscious and conscious memories from the point of view of the extended computer-self, Extrose, into his biological brain using the same nerve signals a normal human brain uses to modify itself, and also writing the memories of his biological point of view into the computerized cell-by-cell simulation of his brain occupying a locationless address inside the vast logic diamond now occupying the axis.