The Architect of Aeons Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author thanks unexpectedly kind readers for their words of encouragement, his family for their sacrifices, his publisher for his patience, and certain higher powers (you know who you are!) for their inspiration and grace.

  Quotes from The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson are used with thankfulness.

  Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:

  Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,

  Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

  Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,

  And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  PART FIVE

  The Armadas of the Hyades

  1

  A Lost World

  A.D. 11049

  1. Ghost Ship

  The Earth was gone.

  “Damnification and pestilential pustules. You’d better be dead wrong on your dead reckoning, Blackie.”

  The nigh-to-lightspeed starship Emancipation hung in space in the spot where Tellus, the home of man, was in theory supposed to be. Sol hovered to one side, an endless roar of radio white noise and high-energy particles.

  “Restrain your ire, my dear smelly Cowhand. With the navigation beacons wiped out, our precise position is hard to determine. But the sun is at the correct size and distance, and the other planets also. This is where Earth should be.”

  “Blackie! You think the enemy done her in?”

  As a ship, the Emancipation was a titaness: one hundred thousand metric tons displacement, her overall length twice that of a skyscraper’s height from the First Space Age, with a sail spread of five hundred miles, requiring seventy-five thousand terawatts of laser energy to propel. With her sails folded, she looked like the skeleton of an umbrella with absurdly long and spindly arms, or perhaps like some microscopic marine animal. She had been designed for a complement of four hundred and eighty fully human persons, a complement of twenty posthuman Melusine, whose cetacean members would occupy the fore cistern, and an additional complement of twenty packs of subhuman dog-things, who would occupy kennels and factory volumes amidships. But the miles of conduits and inflatable tunnels connecting the fore ramscoop array with the long spine of the aft drive shaft, the rotating living quarters and nonrotating slumber quarters, the workhouses, shroud houses, laboratories, mind-core and launch collar (where an arsenal of pinnaces, probes, landers, missiles, and robotools where docked) were empty. The vast ship was a floating ghost town.

  Like an arrow, even when at rest, the shape of the star-vessel suggested flight, as if she yearned to soar. Newtonian space and time was not suited to her lines: the paradoxes of Einstein were in her, implied by the heavy armor, the drag-reducing streamlines.

  Neither ramscoop nor drivespine had ever once been heated up to form the ship’s vast magnetic funnels fore and aft, nor had her polymer sails, brightest mirrors of weightless gossamer, ever been run out to their full multimile-wide diameter. Despite her name, the nigh-to-lightspeed vessel had never achieved near-lightspeed, nor even left the Solar System.

  “Cowhand, whatever do you mean by ‘done her in’?”

  “Blackie, I mean beefed her!”

  The ship had two crewmen, or three, depending on how one counted. The two humans (or technically, incarnate posthumans) aboard were Menelaus Illation Montrose, who had once been the Judge of Ages before his abdication, and Ximen del Azarchel, who had once been the Master of the World before his exile. They were the best of friends and deadliest of foes, as well as being the only members of their subspecies, homo sapiens posthominid, called Elders or Early Posthumans, and both in love with the same long-lost girl, the Princess Rania of Monaco, and both unwilling, during this particular protracted interval of time, to take up weapons and murder each other as they both so dearly wished to do. Each one was, in his own way, a very lonely man.

  “Beef what? That is hardly more clear.”

  “Blackie, don’t you speak proper Texan? I mean, d’you reckon the Varmint destroyed the Earth?”

  At the moment, both men had their bodies safely tucked away in biosuspension coffins, with four quarts of submicroscopic fluid machinery occupying all the major cells and cell clusters in their corpses. Whether the bodies were alive or dead was a matter of semantic nicety. The nanomachinery slowed the biological processes to a rate indistinguishable from stasis, except that at the moment enough of their neural tissue was at an activity level to house their consciousnesses. The coffins were clinging by their crablike legs to surfaces that could be called bulkhead, or deck, or overhead (in zero gee the distinction is also a semantic nicety) of the forward storage locker used as the ship’s bridge. Calling this the bridge was yet another semantic nicety, since the control interfaces and guidance systems could be piped into any cabin in the ship where the pilot found himself, and several spots on the hull.

  “As for that, my dear friend, I, ah, ‘reckon’ it to be unlikely.”

  “Issat so? Gimme your whys and wherefores, Blackie.”

  The third member of the crew (if it could be called that) was visible at the aft of the locker, filling the space where the entire wall (or bulkhead) had been removed, and reaching back along the ship’s major axis some nine hundred yards. This third was a single monomolecular diamond, tinted amber due to nanotechnological impurities: lattices of fluorine-based chemicals like submicroscopic irregular camshafts were woven through the diamond matrix, and formed the basis of a rod-logic computation appliance wherein the ship’s softbrain was housed. The crystal was semitranslucent, and shed some of its waste heat in the form of photons in the visible light spectrum, so a dull erubescent glow, like coals in a grate, filled the amber well of crystal with a smoky red gold.

  “What we know of the Virtue—to use Rania’s name for entities on the hyperpostsuperposthuman level of intellectual topography—comes from the inscription left behind on the Monument at V 886 Centauri, which, even after millennia, the human and posthuman civilizations of Earth cannot fully decipher. But that inscription hints that the Virtue of Hyades was coming here to rule and uplift the Earth, not destroy it.”

  “Yeah, well, looks like someone transposed an omicron for a zero or a doughnut or something, because I am looking at the spot where our mother planet, Earth, is supposedly s’pose to be, and I ain’t seeing nothing but a whole lot of nothing.”

  “The Hyades are not the enemies of man, but our natural masters! They will guide us upward to evolutionary heights undreamed.”

  “Or blast us to atoms, if’n we ain’
t no damned use to them.”

  “You know nothing of them!”

  “Nor you. Nor anyone, human or posthuman or whatthehell.”

  “I know no man shoots his own hounds.”

  “Unless the hound is a mad dog, mad enough to want to die free rather than live the slave of his so-called natural masters.”

  The reason for having this storage locker act as the bridge was that, with the aft bulkhead gone, there was no interface between either man and the ship’s brain. Neither trusted that if the brain information were piped in through some indirect means, a control panel, a touchscreen or wand, that the other man might not bug or jinx the datastream. Both men were wary of the other, and both were gentlemen enough not to let the mutual hatred and suspicion rankle them. Little compromises made things easier: each man designed his own interface, and just sent a maser or laser into the depth of the crystal mind core at whatever arbitrary spot he chose. Neither man knew the one-inch-wide interface volume the other had claimed as his base of operations in the million-gallon multiton mass of seething thought-crystal.

  Montrose observed, “On second thought, I am going to back off my Fried Earth theory. You’d think there’d be debris.”

  “What if they used contraterrene?” asked Del Azarchel. “The Virtue had the mass of Uranus. Enough to hold one earth-sized mass of antimatter.”

  “Hm. Total conversion would have made a flash we’d have seen while we was cowering like rats out at your old hidey-hole at Jupiter, Blackie.”

  Ximen del Azarchel, with a mental command, pointed a microwave laser at the input-output port on Montrose’s coffin, and sent text with a parallel verbal channel for voice expression, and a wireframe for body language and facial expression. Del Azarchel sent a cartoon image of his lean, goatee’d, devilishly handsome face wearing a supercilious glance of doubt. “Jupiter was in conjunction, so Earth was 6.2 AU from us, masked by Sol.”

  Montrose sent back a shrug, a scowl on his bony, big-nosed, lanky, and lantern-jawed face. “The whole mass of Earth turning instantly to photons? We’d have seen the reflection from the other planets, Sol or no. Odds are you’d see it from Andromeda galaxy in two million years or so, something that bright. You want to check my figures?”

  “No, Cowhand. Do you want to check mine?”

  “Nope, I trust your math more than I trust opening an unshielded data channel. Do you think the Earth is hidden? Shielded somehow?”

  Blackie put a thoughtful look on his cartoon face and sent that. “When we departed the Earth the first time, the human-cetacean group-mind had occupied the entire nickel-iron core of the planet, which you so thoughtfully turned into a gigantic logic crystal for them. They are what a man named Kardashev long ago called a level K-One race: a civilization that controlled the total energy and resources of a planet.”

  “What Rania called a Potentate.” Montrose reminded himself with a mental frown what the scale and magnitude was of these monsters they faced. He knew that, by the Kardashev scale, a civilization controlling the whole output of a star was called K-Two, and of a galaxy, K-Three. The Hyades was between K-Two and K-Three, controlling the total output of matter and energy in a small star cluster, and an intelligence in the hundred billion range: what Rania called a Domination. In her scale, a civilization that totally exploited the mass and energy output of a gas giant was called a Power. The servant of the Hyades dispatched to Sol, large as a gas giant but much more finely organized, was called a Virtue, and was above K-One but below the K-Two level, controlling more mass-energy than a rocky planet but less than the total mass-energy of a star system.

  Blackie was sending: “Like an ugly duckling finally reaching its own, the Earthly civilization was the first human race truly to supersede humanity. You saw how quickly the Swans reestablished the ancient weather control of the Sixtieth Century, how rapidly they converted the interior mass of the moon to logic diamond, and created the Selene Mind. It’s been four hundred years since last we were allowed on Mother Earth but you saw the rate of development.”

  “I sure did.”

  “They were evolving from something at the edge of what we could comprehend to something beyond that edge. The growth rate was asymptotic.”

  “Always is, during a boom, Blackie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean in real life, and not in daydreams, things got a natural growth rate until they run into a natural growth limit. Then the asymptote flips over: sure, advanced societies still advance, but always slower. Lookit how quick the fastest a man could go went from the speed of a sailing ship to the speed of a supersonic jet. And then in the decades after—what happened? Man did not keep getting faster and faster. Lookit how free mankind got during the Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution, and the abolition of slavery. And then what happened? Natural limits began to set in, and people didn’t keep getting more free and more, they started losing their liberty by sips and dribbles in my country, and by gulps in yours. What makes you think intelligence growth doesn’t have built in limits?”

  “Merely because I know that an ape could not imagine a human. We are not discussing a merely linear increase in thinking speed, but a revolution in the quality of thought, the use of means beyond our imagination. Do you, ah, ‘reckon’ that the Swans, while we were absent, might have passed beyond an event horizon of asymptotic growth, and evolved beyond our reckoning?”

  “And do what? Invent a technology that allows them to bend light around the entire globe?”

  “Nothing so dramatic. Merely a layer of ash and dust brought up from the interior would lower the albedo. Let us never forget, just because we are dealing with entities that crossed one hundred and fifty-one lightyears to conquer us, that even something so small as a solar system is unimaginably vast, even for imaginations such as ours. If the Earth were not reflecting light, if we were out of estimated position by a few hundred thousand miles…”

  “So where is Selene, the intelligent moon? Every crater and pothole was supposed to have a weapon inside. She was going to be the great offensive fortress, our rock of Gibraltar in the sky. The face of the moon lights up like a Christmas tree when she fires her main beam, and all the smoke from all the secondary launchers gets ionized in the hash. Where is she now?” Menelaus sent a sigh. “What if the ash and dust got kicked up not from the Potentate masking the Earth? Weapon damage would do the same.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t want to believe it, Blackie. Those Varmints are evil.”

  “The Virtue is meant to introduce us into the Galactic Civilization!”

  “As serfs. Or all-meat patties. And if they was here to introduce us, where is they?”

  “They who? You mean the Virtue?”

  Not long ago, while orbiting Ganymede, the long-range telescopes of the Emancipation’s astronomy house had captured an image of the intruder as it passed into the Solar System.

  It had been a globular mass the size of a gas giant, adorned with silver clouds swirled into storm systems large enough to swallow smaller worlds. The clouds covered a liquid surface black as sin. They had seen the black mass drifting like a soap bubble toward the blue loveliness of Earth, moving with no visible means of propulsion. Fourteen immense machines or organisms that looked like trees in winter or naked umbrellas had been in orbit around it. These were the orbit-based space elevators or “skyhooks” whose blueprint had been seen on the surface of the Monument: the instruments used for deracinating whole populations of one planet to another. These skyhooks had had the decency to have reaction-drive engines, and move according Newtonian principles, even if the mother mass had not.

  They had lost sight of the apparition as it passed toward the inner system.

  Blackie said, “We are crippling ourselves by operating at less than optimal intelligence. Let us warm up the mind core to full self-awareness.”

  “It took me ten thousand years to figure out how to destroy Exarchel, your last fully self-aware supermachine
, and that was when I had a supermachine of my own occupying the Earth’s core helping me. No thanks. Next idea?”

  Blackie said, “Let’s take a year or two and look for occlusions. If a body passes before a star, we can find it.”

  Montrose said, “We can also keep an eye on any orbital anomalies. A mass the size of Uranus, if it is still in the system, might not mess up the fallpath of Jupiter too much, but we should be able to see its influence on the motions of the smaller planets, Mercury and Pluto. And let’s deploy the sails a little bit, and gather in some light.”

  “Which may expose us to the Virtue, if the body is still in this system. With our sails open, we are visible to anyone with a medium-powered telescope.”

  “Let’s risk it. I got two reasons. First, the aliens never approached any object smaller than a planet before. This ship is just a mayfly to them, and we’re just specks.”

  “Hm. I seem to recall that even humans occasionally swat flies. What is your second reason?”

  “We’re both reckless and bored.”

  By unspoken mutual consent, both men lowered their subjective rate of passing time until they could see through the various instruments in the astronomy houses fore and amidships, or brought in through extravehicular remotes, the jeweled dots of the planets moving like waltzing dancers against the star-gemmed velvet of vacuum.

  Intently they watched.

  2. Visions of Great Worlds Afar

  A.D. 11050

  They created indentations in portions of the sail to use as convex mirrors and flexed the shrouds to turn them this way or that. These immense light-gathering fields were larger than any Earth-based telescope could be. It was like having a lens the size of the arctic ice cap.

  Montrose soon noticed an anomaly in the drain of resources from the ship’s astronomy house: the ship’s brain was spending time poring over data peripheral to star occlusion scans. He was curious what Del Azarchel was seeking, and carefully, slowly, and secretly, he heterodyned a repeater signal on the incoming astronomical data.