The Lords of Creation Page 5

  Aeneas said, “I have not tampered with your signet ring. You may broadcast commands to anyone you wish.”

  Lord Saturn was puzzled. “What if I command them to turn weapons on this asteroid?”

  Aeneas sighed impatiently. “You never wanted to be a Lord of Creation. It did not suit your artistic temperament. But you had to be one, to defend yourself against your brothers. Now you put me in your shoes! I decreed myself the new Lord Tellus! Your choice is to keep attacking me, or to allow me to abdicate. You are no prisoner, because the choice for peace must be free and mutual. Come: I must discover the origin of the Infinithedron, if we are to defeat the enemy.”

  It did not take long. Cone-shaped satellites teleported into orbit around the planet Saturn focused strange energies on the icy orb of Pluto.

  Lord Saturn said, “The data from any event must settle from the information layer to the memory layer of the universe, where time particles are produced, before this method can read them. The more current an event, the more difficult it is to read. Let us start with five million years ago. Lord Pluto will have to direct me.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Look to the foot of Wright Mons.”

  The image was carried through all their signet rings directly into the visual cortex of their brains. At the location named was the many-sided orb of the Infinithedron, half-buried in the oxygen ice, as complex as a human brain. It glowed orange-gold.

  Even as they watched, the orb wrinkled, and its many surfaces divided and divided again.

  A cry of alarm escaped Aeneas. “Impossible!”

  Lord Pluto said, “It is made of Schroedinger matter. The act of observation collapses the probability clouds of which it is composed.”

  Lord Saturn said, “This is five million years past.”

  Aeneas said, “How is the Infinithedron able to react then to the event of us here seeing it now?”

  But Lady Luna snapped her fingers, “Another observer must be alive, then and there.” Now she frowned, looking spooked. “In the Neolithic. On Pluto.”

  To the near horizon a mile away, a level expanse of oxygen ice beneath a layer of hydrogen snow reached, motionless, silent, dead.

  Saturn said, “The Palaeoscope picks up life energy as easily as light waves. There is no living thing on this world.”

  Aeneas said softly, “Then who is looking?”

  Saturn said, “I can probe further back… five million years… seven… ten…”

  Glacier-mountains shrunk and craters vanished as the planet grew younger.

  Suddenly, at the ten million year mark, the planet was covered with a hellish city from pole to pole, dark with factories and torture cages, armories, slave pens, cannibal feast halls, weapon vents. Despite the lightness of the planet, the architecture was squat, ugly, asymmetrical. It had a similar architecture to Necropolis: the buildings were wedge-shaped, wider at the top than at the base, and gates and windows likewise.

  “Where are the natives?” asked Lady Luna. For the city was empty and dead.

  The planet moved. At eleven million years, Pluto was moving through the Oort cloud, the outer asteroid belt surrounding the solar system. At twelve, it was in interstellar space.

  Lord Saturn said thoughtfully, “Our idea of history must be revised. Father was not the one who murdered the three hundred officers and crew of the Cerberus and changed them into necroforms. Unlikely he could have created the complex equipment needed to induce the shadow-effect into the cellular life. He had not the means.”

  Luna said, “Then who did?”

  Saturn said, “The natives. The Plutonians.”

  The world-city of the sunless interstellar planet was now filled with moving things, manlike shapes. The narrow streets were filled with hot-eyed and pale-skinned hominids, moving with the jerky, unnatural energy of creatures whose dead limbs are animated by superhuman force. There were throngs. It was a vampire world.

  Episode 07: The Feast of Vampires

  Aeneas, Lady Luna, and the Lords Pluto and Saturn stared at the long-dead past of planet Pluto.

  Lord Saturn said, “Why do they look like people?”

  Aeneas said, “We wondered the same thing. Forms like this are also at Alpha Centauri and Zeta Herculis.”

  At twelve and a half million years ago, the planet changed: now there were green plants and trees on the interstellar world, despite the absence of a sun.

  Aeneas said, “Their terraforming was equal to ours. They have an artificial envelope of atmosphere, at least at that time. What happened?”

  Lord Saturn said, “My method crosses time, not space. More than half a lightyear outside the Solar System, I cannot see. The oldest image layer is here: thirteen million years ago.”

  The dark fanes and pillared temples were filled with living men, huge in the low gravity, but too large to pass between the pillars. The pillars were not pillars, but bars. The hot-eyed vampires gathered from time to time on the shining plaza grounds and esplanades to feast on them, but they never smiled at the lingering torment inflicted on their victims.

  Through the transparent layers of ice, the woebegone faces of the trapped giants could be glimpsed in agony as their life energy was drained from them.

  After each feast, the vampire creatures marched silently along the crooked roads of the world-city. They gathered into an arena. In the center, buried up to the neck, was a gigantic monster so huge as to make the giants minnows. To this half-buried head the vampires bowed and prayed. The skull was a dome. Its face was horrible, its mouth a gaping pit, its eyes filled with pain and pride. From out the ghastly mouth would reach a score of tongues like tentacles, yard upon yard, and eat his own worshippers.

  There was another, larger arena to the south, with an even larger twin to this monster there, and another after that, in every district of the world. The further south the monster was buried, the larger it was.

  A monster at the south pole, far larger than the others, whose crown extended beyond the atmosphere, would reach out with mouth-tentacles miles in length. Vaster than dark rainbows, the dripping tendrils stretched across horizons. It raped the lesser monsters of their stolen life, torturing them, but leaving the rest of them mostly intact. Its eyes glared with ecstasy, and temblors shook the small world as its buried body writhed, but soon it subsided and wept, and closed its eyes to sleep again.

  Lady Luna said, “Where do they come from?”

  Aeneas looked at the orbital elements in the image. “They are from Gamma Crucis, eighty-eight lightyears away. The nearest red giant.”

  Lord Saturn said doubtfully, “Are these the Forerunners?”

  Aeneas said, “I doubt it. Where is the Infinithedron?”

  The image changed to roughly nine and a half million years ago. They saw a black cube hanging in space. It was the Infinithedron in its simplest form, with no observers. The cube fell through black space, approaching Pluto.

  The black cube made a soft landing on Pluto, in the snow at the foot of the mound which later would grow into the ice volcano of Wright Mons.

  Lord Saturn said, “All my life, I thought the Infinithedron was a library, a repository of knowledge, that Father found on Pluto. What is it, really?”

  Lord Pluto said, “More than that.”

  Lord Saturn focused on the cube and ran the images backward, as the alien object crossed the billions of miles from the inner system.

  It came from Earth.

  The cube had lifted off from Antarctica. At that time, in the Late Miocene, Antarctica’s northern peninsula was a tundra. Lord Saturn found an image of the black cube resting silently on a knoll covered with pine trees, while dire wolves and wooly mammoths prowled the snowy wastelands in the near distance.

  Luna said, “So the Forerunners are earthmen?”

  Aeneas said, “No. This is before Homo sapiens.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Brother, please go back to the Cretaceous extinction.”

  Fifty five million years earlier, the cube was in the same locati
on, except that Antarctica was a tropic land.

  The Infinithedron was glowing with blinding, unearthly energies. Particle energy beams of immense force and range were shining into the sky like searchlights, disintegrating incoming meteors, or forcing them aside to miss the Earth. There were dozens, scores, hundreds.

  The desperation of the cube was obvious: its beams stammered, flickered, and failed.

  It was a very near thing. One and only one enemy meteor made it through this magnificent defense, and even it was disintegrated to half its original size.

  This meteor struck the Yucatan Peninsula at Chicxulub with a force two million times more potent than a fifty megaton atomic bomb.

  The crater was twelve miles deep. Tens of thousands of cubic miles of sediment were displaced: superheated dust, ash and the steam from the boiling waters of the newly-formed Gulf of Mexico smothered half the globe. The largest megatsunami in Earth’s history reached to Texas and Florida. Shrapnel thrown into orbit by the impact reentered the atmosphere as incandescent fragments, igniting wildfires. Shockwaves triggered earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the other hemisphere. A black cloud covered the world for a decade.

  Lady Luna said, “Lord Saturn, with your machine, you never looked into the extinction of the dinosaurs before?”

  The old man said, “Many times. I encountered blank spots which I thought were some natural failure of the record layer. There were no images of the Infinithedron shooting multimegaton power beams into space.”

  Lord Pluto said, “We are allowed to behold what was formerly hidden. Trace the Chicxulub impactor to its source.”

  Lord Saturn gave his brother a curious look, but asked no question. The viewpoint backtracked the incoming meteors. Earlier, they had been a single hundred-mile wide worldlet headed toward Earth. It was severed by a beam issuing from Earth, forming the Baptistina family of asteroids. The family then accelerated, only to be deflected or disintegrated by the Infinithedron. All but one.

  And the Baptistina worldlet, in turn, came from the Oort cloud. Before that, it was in interstellar space.

  As with Pluto, at a certain point in the past, suddenly the worldlet was covered with a worldwide city. The hellish architecture was the same, the crooked streets, the buildings wider at top than bottom, the giants trapped in feasting cages, and the buried monsters with their multiple tongues.

  Aeneas said, “As with Pluto. It comes from Gamma Crucis.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Brother, can you find the exact moment when the vampires were wiped out on both worlds?”

  Lord Saturn said, “The Plutonians of the Miocene were destroyed when Pluto passed inside the orbit of Neptune. The Baptistina worldlet of the Paleocene was much closer before the vampires dissolved, about halfway between Neptune and Uranus.” He turned to Aeneas. “Speaking of which, you need Lord Uranus, so you will have to go into deep space and recover him, just as you did me. The neuropsionic solar radiation properties that destroyed these necroform creatures were different during the two different eras. It is his area of expertise: I know nothing of it.”

  Aeneas said, “I take it you believe my wild tale of space vampires now, Uncle.”

  Saturn said, “These images can be blocked by Lord Pluto’s science of invisibility. I doubt they can be faked.” He turned to Pluto. “Why did you block me before, brother?”

  Lord Pluto said, “Not I. Father knows all he taught us.”

  Lord Saturn said, “Father! He yet lives? Why is he letting us see these things now?”

  Pluto said, “For the same reason the Infinithedron sent the signal to Earth when it detected evidence of space travel: to prepare us for the next battle. Come! Let us see more. Where did the Infinithedron originate? Where are the Forerunners?”

  At four hundred fifty million years ago, during the Ordovician Period, the cube splashed down in the seas of the Southern Hemisphere.

  Lord Saturn said, “This is the Silurian Extinction. It is a period I have never studied. Roughly half of the marine families were wiped out…”

  The sea bed was a phantasmagoria of primitive life. Clams, mussels, scallops, large and small, ranged the sea. Echinoderms, starfish either five-armed or seven-armed, stone lilies, sea cucumbers stalked the watery wonderland. Bryozoans like soft, fantastic fronds of lace grew everywhere, and coral in crooked horns like witchy towers wearing gem-studded armor.

  Resting in the middle of an active volcano at the bottom of the polar sea, the black cube seemed to do nothing for at time. Then, at forty-four million years ago, particles left the cube. A cloud spread like ink through the seas. Roughly half the life in the sea was changed. Brachiopods and bryozoans were affected, along with trilobites, eel-like conodonts, and wormy graptolites.

  Not destroyed, the sea worms and plants rose to the surface, and were washed ashore. Like some cursed maiden in a Greek myth, the organisms transformed, putting down roots, or burrowing into the sand.

  Green plants spread across dry land, forming extensive forests. It was a primordial garden of ferns. No flowers, and no animal life was anywhere in them.

  They all recognized what they were seeing. “Pantropy,” said Luna. “It was not an extinction at all. Why?”

  Lord Pluto said, “Earlier, please.”

  The Infinithedron came from out of the sun. They watched the black cube rising up from against the immense gravitational pull of the star, untouched and unharmed by fires able to melt any object made of matter, serenely move through space, and going into orbit around the Earth.

  Saturn said, “Either the Forerunners live in the Sun, which I doubt, or the cube entered Sol earlier for some purpose. That event I cannot find. My instruments cannot read inside solar plasma.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Let us inspect the destruction of the plutonian vampires. Have all the sensors of all bands trained on the image. I want to see what becomes of the death-energy accumulated by an entire civilization of necroforms over millions of years.”

  Saturn returned the viewpoint to the Pluto of ten million years ago. Here was the hellish torture-city of the vampire race. The trapped giants had all been consumed eons before, and the green life. The atmosphere had been allowed to collapse. As Pluto approached the solar system, the vampires began to writhe and melt, even though Sol was hardly brighter than the morning star in the black and airless skies. Even those on the hemisphere away from the sun died.

  Like burning wax, each slumped into a reddish and vile liquid, screaming, gibbering, hands clawing. As each one melted, it tried to consume its melting neighbor, and drain it of its horde of stolen life energy. The buried colossuses of each district reached out across the rooftops with tongues dripping and melting as they reached, licking up the half-fluid half-corpses of their expiring worshippers. The larger colossuses ate the smaller. The monster of the south reached out its tongues many miles long, and consumed them in turn. Then it also melted. Its eyes ran over its flabby cheeks like tears; its domelike skull sagged and cracked and released a deluge.

  The waters poured out and out as the extensive body, larger than a continent, liquefied, and was forced to the surface by the collapse of subterranean vaults the once-solid bones of the monster had forced open.

  The waters of the monster covered the planet from pole to pole, and froze.

  The hundred-tongued monster of the south, even as it melted, used the death energy gathered from its slaves to activate the selfsame warpcore later found by Lord Tellus. This halted its approach toward Sol, and preserved it from further damage.

  Though clogged with ice, the muzzles of interplanetary range weapons were readied, trained on Earth, but lacked the energy to fire.

  The black cube fell from space, and erected a warp field. A wrestling match began. The cube pulled Pluto closer to the sun; the world-vampire pulled away. Eons passed. Eventually the world-vampire tired and slept. The cube stood guard over it.

  And the glacier stirred. The cube became an octagon. The glacier murmured. The octagon became a dodecahedron
, then an icosahedron, then…

  Lady Luna said in a voice of cold horror, “It is still there, isn’t it?”

  Lord Pluto said heavily, “In old stories, the seal of Solomon was said to cap the brass bottle in which an evil spirit was trapped. The Forerunners had the foresight to write on their Solomonic seal all the sciences needed to arm anyone who opened it against what might be released.”

  Episode 08: The Black Ship

  Aeneas said, “I am curious about one other thing, Lord Saturn. Someone left a black pearl hidden in my bedchamber, and put its mate on Pluto, in the ruins of the Cerberus expedition habitat. I want to see who it was.”

  “These events were too recent,” said Lord Saturn.

  Lord Pluto said, “I have records. The visual logs from the expedition.”

  A mental command to his signet ring presented the images to them.

  It was odd looking at the twenty-four year old images of young Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis in his political officer’s uniform, hauling himself hand over hand down the axis of the Cerberus, a vessel of antique design, with no artificial gravity.

  They watched the landing, and the erection of the habitat, and the initial months of search. Everything was visible up until the moment when, standing in a circle around the excavation crater, three hundred officers and crew, in their environment armor, waited for the drill-and-grapple crane to bring the newly discovered Infinithedron up a sheer well to the icy surface of Pluto.

  Only Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis was back inside the ship, watching from a distance. Then the images went dark.

  Lord Pluto said, “Events touching the Cerberus expedition after this point have always been censored. Father wishes me not to discover all my brothers’ secrets, or his.”

  Aeneas said, “Do you have any record of who approached your world to plant the black pearl in the ruins of the habitat?”

  Lord Pluto said, “No. However, it must have been done by ship. Perhaps Saturn can find the image of any recent vessels in the area.”