The Lords of Creation Read online

  But as it shrank it darted toward the planet Saturn, accelerating.

  Aeneas raised his ring and issued commands to the Talos warpcore, and uttered a ragged cry of horror. “It’s not working! The plutonian warpcore is still active—the enemy has established a zone of space I cannot collapse or manipulate!”

  They watched in helpless horror as the singularity passed into the gas giant and struck the north pole. The singularity itself was invisible, but the point of impact was visible.

  The surface of Saturn puckered and distorted. The cloud bands of Saturn were pulled up as the singularity approached, swirled together in an immense spiral toward a burning point of nothingness.

  Then the floating continents of the struck hemisphere were pulled up and toward the singularity in a vast curving archipelago of destruction.

  The damage came not from the gravity, for the singularity was only the mass of Pluto, nor from the threat of Saturn being consumed, for the surface area of the event horizon was only a few acres. The damage came from the matter of Saturn being disintegrated under tidal stress as it was pulled into the pinpoint of superdense nonbeing, heated to plasma, and released as x-rays and gamma rays and high energy particles: the atmosphere of Saturn was irradiated and superheated.

  Vents of gas erupted in huge arcs up into space and back down again. The hydrogen ignited and burned blue, and then, heated even hotter, began to fuse. An irregular cloud of solar plasma with limbs of fire like a burning kraken erupted into being in the center of the collapsing hemisphere of Saturn.

  All the billions of men living on the flying continents near the point of impact were killed instantly as white-hot x-rays passed through the area, ionizing atoms, breaking chemical bonds, fusing atoms. The heat released simply obliterated anything made of matter, including the containment vessels for powerhouses and space contortion fields that were part of modern, civilized life. The ignition of these captive energies, now freed, added fire to fire. The continent-sized habitats in the southern hemisphere which were farther from the point of impact drifted serenely for the long moment before the supersonic shockwave passed the equator and converged.

  Nothing on Earth had ever been as large as this semisolid wall of winds. A hundred Earths could have wandered, lost, in the immensity of Saturn’s atmosphere, and never been in sight of each other. Flying continents larger than the whole surface area of Earth were upended.

  The continents were overturned by the pressure, crumbled under the stress. Seen from space, the lights of famous cities could be seen to go dark, as swiftly as if a cloak had been thrown across a constellation and smothered it. The smaller lights of floating palaces and pleasure craft drifting in the serene cloud-filled abyss were extinguished without being noticed.

  For a moment, the planet Saturn seemed to be like a fruit with a large bite taken out of it, or like a small, burning star with a hemisphere of gaseous matter poised like a shell over the southern half of it. Then the edges of the globe collapsed inward toward the burning star, pulled by the mass, which, albeit compressed, had not disappeared. Like a cresting wave breaking, the rim of matter overhanging the bottomless bright well of the singularity fell inward. The violence of this fall, the tidal stress, and the agitation from the accretion disk broke the atoms into their subatomic constituents. As the singularity ate further and further into the boiling liquid heart of Saturn, the collapsing rim ignited into atomic fire.

  Aeneas, his face white and sweat-slick with stress, tried again and again to warp the timespace and hinder these disastrous effects. He tried to set warps around the moons and pull them away, or change the rate of propagation of light to preserve them from the gamma ray and x-ray bombardment. Nothing worked. The moons were scalded like cinders, and their artificial atmospheres blown out into space by the sheer radiation pressure issuing from the dying world.

  Each cubic mile of Saturn’s immense ocean of atmosphere could sustain many more people than Earth at her most overcrowded. Aeneas was appalled, for he was unable to imagine, unable to grasp, the numbers who had just died: husbands, wives, children, caught without warning in the midst of work and play.

  Episode 10: Hatred for All Life

  Aeneas said, “If I can figure out how the enemy folded the space here, I can undo it, and maybe I can warp some of the flying continents on the farther hemisphere to Uranus or Jupiter… a chance to live…”

  But Lord Saturn, his face as motionless as the face of a dead man, said, “Leave them.”

  Aeneas jerked, and stared at him in wordless wonder.

  “Abandon them,” said Lord Saturn. “The singularity was not meant for my world. It was sent toward the Sun, and it is accelerating.”

  Lord Pluto said, “Once it passes lightspeed, you will not be able to see or stop it. You must stop it now.”

  “How?” shouted Aeneas. “A protective zone of flat space prevents me from forming a warp anywhere near!”

  Lord Saturn said, “Then form one far away. Pick up the neutron star called the Great Eye, and place it in the path of the singularity before it strikes our sun, and completes the work of obliterating all my brother’s worlds as it has done with mine.”

  Aeneas said, “But if any of your people are still alive…”

  “The remnant of Saturn will not outlive the death of our star.”

  Aeneas said, “I am drained. I don’t have the power to move the Great Eye.”

  Saturn said, “I am turning over to you control of the remaining energy production stations, space contortion dynamos, and powerhouses through the rings and moons and satellites. They will not last long. Use them wisely, my lord Emperor.” He drew a deep and ragged breath. “Save the people!”

  This amount of energy was not negligible: the original warpcore had been powered by the output of the four gas giants, and the contributions of minor planets, worldlets, and moons. This was roughly an eighth of that.

  But it was enough.

  Aeneas, his face grim, issued the orders to the Talos warpcore. Signals issued to quantum entangled particle-pairs inside and outside the spherical singularity altered their mutual frames of reference. The Tipler rings raced. The lightcone of timespace in the immediate area was tilted by the frame-dragging effect. A closed timelike curve segment was formed between the Great Eye, and a point just beyond the dying Saturn.

  A blue-white dot emerged, dazzling, and swelled into the immensity of the Great Eye. The invisible singularity must have emerged from the far hemisphere of Saturn, for the burning mass of its accretion disk, and the immense gravitic distortion glowing like a dull coal, reached out from the ruins of Saturn and struck square into the center of the Great Eye.

  The surface distorted and puckered when the unseen pinpoint of nothingness intersected it. Concentric rings of fission and tidal stress ignition surrounded the point of impact. But the neutronium was not so easily pulled into the event horizon as the high-pressure liquid atmosphere of Saturn. The neutron star formed a crater for a moment, with a momentary mountain of neutronium lava midmost, but the immense gravity pulled the surface features flat again.

  And the great scream of the Eye came again. Anyone left alive on Saturn’s moons or orbital space stations no doubt was writhing on the floor. The plutonian vampire must have preset the warpcore of Pluto to catch and amplify it, because the tachyon sensors detected a faster-than-light signal carrying that shout of alarm toward all the nearby stars.

  His signet ring, without waiting to ask, had the warpcore establish a thought-free zone around Aeneas, but hollow rather than solid, so that he could still give commands to his ring, which could send them out electronically.

  On the analytical screen, Aeneas could see the gravity well of the singularity at the center of the neutron star. He made slight adjustments. Aeneas placed the singularity at the neutron star’s burning center at the correct distance to pull the plutonian singularity’s path into a parabola, then into a circle, then into an ever-narrowing spiral.

  The two event hori
zons in the middle of a mass of molten neutronium spiraled together, and merged. The combined singularity spun faster and faster, like a spinning iceskater who draws her outflung arms together.

  He turned his attention back toward the dying gas giant. Wherever he could detect life-energy, he formed a warp, and teleported the land mass involved to the corresponding depth in the atmosphere of Jupiter, along with a generous volume of the specialized oxynitrogen clouds terraformers had designed to grant the floating landscape earthly temperature and pressure, and to protect earthlife from the surrounding ultracold high-pressure helium or methane.

  Tears started leaking, unnoticed, along the cheeks of Aeneas’ stern face. It was so few. Out of the countless trillions who once had lived in the immensities of Saturn, so few were left. Perhaps the miraculous superscience of the present age could save bodies horribly burnt by x-rays and gamma rays, but perhaps not, not if the damage were too severe. There were a few more left alive at the outer moons. Aeneas left them where they were, for the mass of Saturn was the same. Despite the magnitude of the disaster, the orbits of the moons had not been disturbed.

  Gently, he returned the broken corpse of the gas giant to its proper location in its orbit, the right distance from the sun for surviving terraformers on the half-burned and blasted moons to restore their environments.

  Lord Saturn said, “My wife, my children… they had contortion pearls. Security insisted they carry them at all times. Many of my officers, courtiers, friends… and there were public teleportation circuits for the common people…”

  Aeneas said, “The enemy flattened the space and prevented the formation of any contortions. I could have counteracted it, if I had only had enough power, enough mass. But I was using the power from Necropolis, and that was stolen, turned against me…. Sir, I… no one could have used a pearl to escape. The way was blocked.”

  Saturn sobbed, “But why? Why, even as it was dying, would the monster bother erecting such a block? Merely to prevent victims from escaping? There were no military targets! It is so malign, so pointless, so…”

  Lady Luna, who had watched the whole disaster wide eyed, now laid a gentle hand on Lord Saturn’s shoulder. “I have seen their dreams. They are consumed with a hatred for all life. They need us and despise us. Perhaps, at one time, in ages long ago, they kept alive certain living things as food sources. But always, sooner or later, their hatred and jealousy of life overcame them, and they consumed and destroyed it all, even what they needed for themselves. Ours may be the last living star in the galaxy.”

  Lord Saturn sank down on one knee before Aeneas. “What you compelled from me before, my sovereign lord, I now freely offer. Lord Tellus passed his knowledge to you. It must have been him: there is no one else who knew the superluminary science! Let not my people have died in vain!”

  Aeneas felt the pull of temptation. The splendor and pomp that could be his for the asking! No, he did not need to ask. It would be pushed into his hands. Then he could command his uncles, or step on the neck of Lord Mars! Any of his fair cousins, he could ask to be his queen… or, following the lawlessness of Lord Tellus himself, he could gather as many wives and concubines as Solomon…

  Raw self-loathing shocked him back to his senses. Is this what drove Lord Tellus mad, in the end? When even a sober man is given so much power, power to escape all punishment, all retaliation, will he always lose the ability to tell right from wrong?

  There, in his eye, was the burning wreckage of a world, collapsed to half its former volume, bright with burning fires in its methane layers, its core now a neutronium ball mere yards in diameter. Saturn had been one of the brightest jewels in the Solar System, a center for art, contemplation, and culture unparalleled in history. There were not even bodies to recover! All obliterated, now, due to the dying malice of a sick-minded undead creature. That was what evil looked like, when let free of the cage of conscience.

  Aeneas said to Saturn, “To your feet, Uncle Geras! Do not bow to me! I will teach everyone my art. We will all be Lord Tellus!”

  But Lord Saturn did not stand. “To whom will the secret be given?”

  Aeneas was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “That black stealthship! Who was aboard? Whoever it was, he is in league with the space vampires, and has known of them for over fifteen years.”

  Aeneas shook his head. He could not truly grasp the idea that someone would betray his family, his species, his kingdom, his very condition of being.

  Lord Saturn stood up. “Each of the Twelve controls a supertechnology known only to himself. Moreover, you have nine brothers and four sisters, and Hermaphrodita, who is both. You have two hundred cousins and twenty nieces and nephews. Then there are the five Empress Dowagers. All of the second and third generation are armed with the basic stratonic technologies we keep within the family, including enough photonics, kinetics, and contortion science to have made that black stealthship. Any of them could have been aboard. So who is the traitor? Who can you trust?”

  Aeneas said, “You, Lady Luna, and Lord Pluto were here with me the whole time.”

  Lord Pluto spoke up. His voice was cold and remote. “I could have arranged all this, or operated the ship by remote control. Lord Saturn likewise. You have not learned the lesson of mistrust I imparted earlier. The family is not to be trusted.”

  Lady Luna looked shocked. She said sharply, “Lord Saturn is above suspicion! Not only has he lost friends and family this day, but if he were the captain of the stealthship, he could have hidden the ship from us by merely not finding her with his machine, which only he controls! Absurd to suspect him!”

  Lord Pluto said, “The human heart is dark. It is not impossible that men should slay wives and children, or kill a thousand billion of souls, if the goal was to obtain immense and untrammeled power over all other men. Before Lord Tellus imposed peace by terror on mankind, this was commonplace.”

  Lord Saturn, standing, was tall enough to look the seated Aeneas straight in the eye. “Imperial Majesty, you must not abdicate the power which the madness of fate or the madness of Lord Tellus has imposed on you. I saw you act with speed and compassion, and save all mankind this day. If you lead, I have some hope of vengeance and retaliation against the foe. If you give your knowledge to the traitor, there is none. And you dare not share your knowledge until the traitor is found. The only way I can prove that I am not he is to insist that I never learn the secret of the superluminary science!”

  Lady Luna said, “It will have to be shared eventually. But I think Lord Saturn speaks reason. Teach me last, after everyone else in the family.” Suddenly she looked woebegone. “I mean Uncle Geras. I– I suppose he cannot be called Lord Saturn, now that the planet is destroyed. And as for how many cousins you have—we don’t know.” She began sobbing.

  Lord Pluto said, “It is a smaller world, but of the same mass. Saturn can be terraformed.”

  Lady Luna gritted her teeth, angry beneath her tears. “Uncle Darius, sometimes you are heartless! Now is not the time to speak of that!”

  Aeneas said, “Not just the family.”

  Lady Luna said, “What?”

  Aeneas said, “I intend to give this secret to each and every man of every race of mankind, on every world, worldlet, moon and asteroid of the solar system.”

  Lord Pluto said, “In our family, perhaps, with risk, you could bestow the power to slay worlds without mankind being slain. But on all mankind, wise and foolish, sane and mad? You saw what one creature armed with warptech did. Extinction is sure.”

  Lord Saturn said, “No matter the numbers: if you make the secret public, the traitor knows it.”

  Lord Pluto turned his lens toward Aeneas, “Can you recover the plutonian warpcore from the center of the Great Eye?”

  Aeneas turned his screen toward the dead sun, and Lady Luna stiffened. She spoke in a trembling voice kept level by an effort of will. “My instruments detect something—a ghost, a fragment—the scream the Great Eye sent is being answer
ed. It is but a single concept, but it hangs in the dreams of the dead sun like a word echoing in an empty hall. Reinforcements.”

  She turned to Aeneas. “The vampire lords of the nearby stars know that life still lingers here, in our solar system. They are stirring from their sleep. The darkness is rising!”

  Episode 11: The Three Headed Throne

  To Aeneas’s surprise, both the plutonian warpcore and that hidden in the Great Eye were salvageable. The measurements of the distortions to the fabric of space tachyonic sensors provided could locate the vertical gravity wells of the two hollow singularities orbiting each other at the superdense neutronium-liquid core of the neutron star.

  Thanks to the bizarre disjunction possible between two frames of reference with no common elements whereby one could measure the mass, volume, or location of the other, Aeneas was able to form a warp which moved the two working warpcores into the very center of his. The singularities were nested, one within the next, all balanced precisely at the barycenter of his Tipler rings.

  Aeneas said, “If we park Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars in orbit around the Gas Giants, the three warpcores may be enough to move Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.”

  Lady Luna asked, “Move them… where?”

  Lord Pluto stood up from the wardroom table where he had been sitting. “Father must have known. The reason he never revealed the secret of faster than light drive to the family was this: the stars are filled with vampires. Yet space is immense, boundless, infinite. There will be a place to find.”

  Lady Luna said, “… a place…? For what? You are kidding! The light of Sol keeps them at bay. Even the Great Eye was instantly obliterated!”

  Aeneas said, “Our position is known, and indefensible. Vampire planets and stars placed in the Oort Cloud, beyond Sol’s reach, could bombard us with waves of worlds like Pluto once was, or Baptistina. We have to abandon the Solar System. We are fleeing, and taking all our worlds with us.”

  Lord Pluto turned to Aeneas, and said solemnly, “I also accept you as my Emperor and vow my fealty to you. You are the protector of the people. What are your orders, Majesty?”