The Architect of Aeons (3 page)

“Nope. We are not waking up your poxy monster brain. Let's ask the survivors.”

That there was technological civilization still on Earth was not in doubt: in addition to the moon, two sails, nearly as broad as the main sail of the
Emancipation,
were orbiting at a half-geosynchronous rate. The Earth was not seen as the normal blue crescent astronauts approaching it tangentially to the sun would see: like a moving continent, a circle of light cast from the farside mirror was passing over the night of the world, and, equal and opposite, a circle of darkness hid the noonside of the world. The crescent of the Earth looked almost like a curving letter
w,
but only if the
w
were dotted like a small letter
j.

Earth herself was shockingly unrecognizable: she had slowed her rate of spin, and the change in centrifugal force, imperceptible as it was, no longer created as large a bulge along her equator; therefore, Canada and Alaska and half of Russia were submerged in the polar sea, the Great Lakes basin was mingled with salt water. The Gulf of Mexico, on the other hand, was now an inland sea, for a second isthmus, of which Cuba and the Caribbean Islands were but hills, joined Florida to Northern Brazil.

Baja California was now the highest elevated of three peninsulas reaching into the Pacific like a hand whose fingertips dripped archipelagoes. India was now connected by an isthmus to Madagascar, making the Arabian Sea an inland lake larger than the Caspian.

A belt of the ocean severed South Africa from a combined Euro-Northafrican continent, and the Mediterranean basin, dry for many ages, had been flooded once more, lapping the slopes of the White Mountains and the Italian Alps. The higher elevations of Egypt and Libya were no more than large islands in this combined Mediterranean and Saharan sea; Mount Gibraltar and Mount Abyla were smaller islands, as was the lonely peak of Malta.

In the East, Australia and Indochina were now part of the Asian supercontinent, and the Sea of Japan was a dry and deep valley between the high plateaus of what had once been Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. In the West, a new land mass shaped like a snake had emerged from the mid-Atlantic ridge, an old fable of Plato now true, if in reverse. Antarctica was entirely submerged.

The ice caps were gone. The amount of water vapor in the air was far lower than it should have been. The sea level was lower by scores of meters than it should have been, even with the other catastrophic climatic changes.

“The orbit is more eccentric than it had been,” announced Del Azarchel. “Much hotter summers and much cooler winters. The ice caps return in winter, I suppose, and reach far down toward the temperate zone. The angle of interaction between the Earth's magnetosphere and the surrounding solar environment should make aurora borealis and aurora australis visible year round and from every latitude. Other than that, from the surface this new orbit would provoke no obvious difference in the appearance of the skies. They even pointed the pole at the pole star, and imparted the exact same precession of the axes.”

“The South Pole,” grunted Menelaus dourly. “You'd think they'd get that detail right. But why did the Varmints move the Earth to a new orbit? What would be the point? And where are they now? Why aren't they shooting at us?” At her current parabolic orbit approaching Earth, the
Emancipation
with sail deployed would have been remarkably visible. Everyone on Earth, even without binoculars, would have seen caught in her sails the bright image of a smaller and colder second sun rising in the east, getting a little bigger every day.

Del Azarchel said, “I don't think the Virtue did this. Look at these figures.” And he sent as text a few thousand lines of Monument notational math, showing the type of electromagnetic impulse that would have been necessary to move an object the size of the Earth to a new inclination.

Menelaus was able to take in the whole equation at a glance, but did not see the significance at first. He paused, divided his mind into several subsections working at different subjective speeds and organizing the information in different patterns and data-groupings before he saw the point. He rejoined his mind into one frame, and sent a low whistle of astonishment along the audio channel.

Del Azarchel must have noticed the pause. “You could have asked.”

“I like reckoning things out for myself. Besides, if we are both thinking what I'm thinking we're thinking, that's independent confirmation. You think the Potentate died, wiped clean by the electromagnetic pulse.”

“Crippled rather than died, depending on electrically inert backups and failovers, but yes. And I think that such a pulse happened before the new orbit. We can reconstruct the order of events. The Hyades Virtue connected the Earth and sun with a flux tube. For what reason, I don't know. That wiped the data out of the core mind. The whole mass of iron was aligned by the shock, and there was a line of plasma connecting the Earth to the sun. The Swans took advantage of it—I cannot tell if the flux tube lasted a second or lasted a decade—to maneuver the Earth into a new orbital inclination, at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Again, for what reason, I cannot fathom.”

A flux tube was a cylindrical region of space where the magnetic field at the side surfaces is parallel to those surfaces. The sun had many such tubes rising from its surface and falling back again in vast arches, paths of least resistance followed by solar flares. Jupiter and Io were connected by a complex dance of flux tubes, carrying heavier and lighter cargoes of cold plasma, either buoyantly expanding away from the giant planet, or massively sinking toward its storm-filled atmosphere.

Since Jupiter was Del Azarchel's personal playground, the headquarters of the most massive project he, or any of the human race, had ever attempted, no doubt he was quicker to recognize the phenomena than Montrose.

Montrose said, “If we hadn't been kicked off the planet by the damnified critters we created…”

“
You
created.…”

“… that got created somehow-or-'nuther, we would have been here to see the shindig.”

Del Azarchel sighed. “I am wondering where the aliens are. The Monument indicated that they were coming here to rule us. It would bring order and peace.”

“Peaceful as a pigsty. Farmer makes sure his swine don't fight each other. And all he asks in return is pork, bacon, and ham.”

Del Azarchel said sardonically, “I can pick out human shapes occupying villages and towns, and the instruments show energy use along the seabeds, so the Melusine are not extinct. Our old friend the horse is still around, regrown from your Tomb archives. And … look at this image. Do you think it is a sporting event?”

Montrose said, “War. Horse cavalry and Mastodon cavalry. Look at the line of organization: that is a posthuman general in charge, someone of our level of intelligence, but nothing as smart as a Melusine or a Swan, much less Potentate.”

5. Battle in the 111th Century

Across the mossy landscape of what had once been sea bottom, the battalions clashed. Soldiers garbed or painted all in green and gold, carrying an emblem of a balance scale, clashed with those in crimson, who fought beneath the sign of a winged hourglass.

The heat was more than tropical, since steam arose from the moss at every footfall. The soldiers were a mix of human and artificial hominids from recent gene records, elephant-legged giants, half-animal Chimerae, dwarfish Locusts, and, from more ancient lines, Neanderthal troglodytes and nocturnal Cro-Magnon. The soldiers of all subspecies wore glass helmets and armor made of prismatic diamond glitter, and fought with energy rays, chemically powered crossbows, and flails and staves and
bokken
swords made of amber-colored wood.

Or at least it looked like wood. The amber weapons had some odd bio-electrical properties: foot-long sparks and blinding flares jumped from the wooden blades or flails when a blow fell. In addition to beating the moss to emit its clouds of vapor and steam, both armies tossed glass grenades or ignited petards to spread clouds of glinting smoke to baffle the ray weapons of the enemy, and the rays seemed remarkably weak even when they struck. It was as if they feared to emit any large-scale discharges.

Montrose asked, “Can you pick up any energy signals coming off those dead bodies? If they are just remote-controlled puppets, and the brain info is just downloaded … ah…”

Del Azarchel said, “The deaths are real. None of them are connected to any remote information system. However, there is someone or something who is the center of worldwide signal traffic approaching from below. Look there.”

In the image, the warring parties parted as suddenly as the Red Sea beneath the rod of Moses. A single figure, manlike but taller than a man, wearing a living cloak like wings, walked across the battlefield. He was barefoot, and walked with precise, mincing steps, stiffed-legged, his toes touching the ground first before his heel. His hair fibers swayed like undersea plant life in an unseen current.

On higher and lower bands of the spectrum, even through the intervening atmosphere, threads of energy dense enough for ultrahigh-speed communication connected this figure with weather balloons and peach-sized artificial satellites in low orbit, continent-sized orbital mirrors in high orbit, and also with towers and dishes here and there along the mountaintops of both Earth and moon.

Montrose pondered the information throughput volumes with alarm. The intelligence level was far higher than his own, or that of Del Azarchel.

The Swan turned and looked up at him. His eyes bored into Montrose's startled gaze like a knife into his brain. Montrose blinked by shutting off the feed from his coffin circuits to his visual centers, because he could not meet that gaze. Of course, the calm-faced superhuman creature was merely glancing at the bright sail of the NTL
Emancipation
climbing to noon, but the effect was unnerving.

Del Azarchel said, “He seems not to notice the battle. A very dignified demeanor! How reticent.”

Montrose opened his visual feed again. He saw the Swan stalking forward. The being did not look left or right at the carnage around him.

Montrose was not sure if Del Azarchel were kidding. “How blind, you mean. The visual information is being edited out of the Swan's reticular complex before it even reaches his cortex. Everything human is invisible to the posthumans. Phantasms. Remember?”

There was no sign of panic or haste among the men: the image was clear enough that Montrose could see officers on either side were giving orders and hearing reports, dressing their lines to await the signal to resume, and meanwhile heralds waving colored flags were shouting across the field to the foe, looking oddly like cheerleaders in their gestures and poses. The men raised their arms and clashed their wooden swords against glass shields with pride or anger at each exchange.

The Swan had emerged from a nearby river, cutting a deep canyon in the mossy sea bottom, and strolled without seeing between the parted armies to a knob of high ground. Neither did he hear the shouts and slogans apparently being shouted back and forth between the momentarily parted armies.

When he first emerged from the water, the posthuman seemed porpoiselike in his face and skin surface, but he became more human-looking as he walked.

The war leaders and standard-bearers and buglers who were occupying that knob of high ground toward which the great Swan stalked, their coign of vantage for overseeing the battle, with swift and practiced motions dismounted and gathered themselves out of the way, and carefully pulled aside walking watchtowers, electric fence posts, basins, and battleflags, so that the Swan would not trip on them.

The warlords did not try to move their now-riderless beasts aside, and when the winged figure raised his hand as if in greeting, the horses broke their pickets and came to nuzzle him, and the mastodons danced with massive mirth for him, and writhed their trunks like comic pythons.

The wings the posthuman wore were not just antennae: the Swan, done petting the beasts, now expanded the wing surface to many times its size, and rose rapidly from the point of rock, effortlessly as a thistledown rising. The surface of his body changed color as he entered thinner atmosphere, as if he had biotechnological mechanisms for adjusting to extremes.

The face was becoming hardened and featureless in preparation for vacuum: a statue of diamond.

6. Phantasms

Del Azarchel took the time to draw up a detailed version of a sardonic expression to his face, exaggerating the twist of the lips and making the supercilious eyebrow arch higher than he could in real life lift it, before he passed it to Montrose on the visual channel.

Montrose said, “Are you surprised? You were expecting that my phantasm system would be broken by now.”

Del Azarchel said, “It has been half a millennium. One would think a superior brain would notice the gaps in the visual patterns, the unexplained shadows, the unexpected and indirect clues.”

Montrose did not point out that Del Azarchel's pet brain Exarchel had been inflicted with the same phantasm program for ten millennia, and never combined the tiny irregularities or indirect clues to deduce that he had a blind spot. Instead, he said only, “The more superior a brain is, the easier it is for it to fool itself, and explain things away.”

“Every corpse on the battlefield below there, his blood is on your hands. If the posthumans were allowed to tame the humans, war would be gone. I suppose your posthuman intellect can easily explain your guilt away, Cowhand?”

“Well, I can explain your guilt to you. You thought your posthuman brain gives you the right to rule humans. But logically this means the higher powers from the stars have the right to rule you.”

“I have never rebelled against them. There is a natural order to the cosmos, like a ladder. Everyone has his place.”

“I have never submitted. I reckon that is my place in the natural order. As for my guilt; what guilt? I did not put a bullet in any of those corpses down yonder. All I did was cut off the bottom rung of your cosmic ladder. The rest of y'all on the up-high rungs can enslave each other to your heart's content, but the humans at the bottom, I dealt out of the game. But I was as fooled as you, old pal. I thought the Hyades were coming to set up shop.”