The serpent added, “Our mental forms are designed to be compatible with what is known of the Hyades behavior strategies.”
“So his personality is reflected in all of you? You are all Blackie? Your whole damned race is Blackie? And he tortures himself to keep from killing himself? What kind of twisted freak is he? Pox on my poking stick! After all this time, I still ain’t got no idea what makes his sick mind tick.”
The biped said, “The comments are irrelevant, and will be discarded.”
One of the smaller Montroses standing on the table said, “Mortiferous pestilence, but I ain’t heard Blackie called Senior in a long time! Not the Master of the World no more, eh?”
And the voice of Iron Ghost Montrose said from the crystal wall, “He’s back to Landing Party boss.”
Montrose pondered that for a moment with several of his minds.
7. Voyages to Stepmother Earths
A.D. 14303 TO 14551
Long ago, Blackie had launched the Emancipation to Epsilon Eridani, ten lightyears from Sol, bringing a delighted Montrose. It was not exactly his first interstellar voyage, but it was the first one he made while sane. Now that Jupiter had decreed an end to Blackie’s exile, he had no trouble finding volunteers to create a new Hermetic Order, from which he bred and selected a picked complement of Swans officers and Firstling crew, mostly Sylphs.
Fairer than all songs, brighter than a sword unsheathed, the great ship opened her wings of fire, and rode a river of light across the endless night.
The world there, a tide-locked world called Nocturne, had been too poor to build a deceleration laser, so the Emancipation had shed one sail ahead, and caught in her deceleration chutes the reflected beam from that sail as it retreated into endless space.
The humans—if they could he called that—had enthusiastically embraced the sciences of pantropy which Jupiter had narrowcast to them before their first landfall. The deracination ship was still present in orbit, as an O’Neill colony from which populations had been, from time to time in centuries long past, floated randomly to the surface in great bubbles of alien material. Through pantropy those humans and their livestock were radically altered to allow them to survive, and a different species dominated each zone of ever-colder and ever-darker climates from the plutonian West Pole to the almost-terrestrial clime of the Terminator, the line of eternal dusk that surrounded the pole-to-pole equator of the planet.
The world was ruled by a cabal of cliometrists called Actuaries, who manipulated economies and events to force families and clans to tinker with their gene plasms and produce the various freakish sub-races to fill the allotted slots in their biologically determined caste system.
The dayside of Nocturne was uninhabitable, but Montrose and Del Azarchel had shown the Actuaries how to grow self-replicating acres of solar energy cells across the dead sea bottoms there.
In gratitude for the industrial revolution this innovation had fathered, the Actuaries had cannibalized the hulk of the deracination ship to build a launching laser in order to allow the Emancipation to sail back to Sol.
The round trip had taken less than a century.
Later, Del Azarchel was commanded by the growing Jupiter Brain to mount an expedition to Delta Pavonis, the other surviving colony, nearly bankrupting the Earth to do so.
This colony was twice as far away, a world called Splendor. Like a white gem set in an opalescent ring, Splendor shared its orbit with a bright, multicolored ring system stretching entirely around Delta Pavonis, a sun ringed like Saturn. This asteroid belt was thought to be the remnant of a disintegrated gas giant of which Splendor was supposed to be a surviving moon. At every latitude, the immense and brightly colored bands of the belt were visible, a rainbow running from horizon to horizon through the sun.
Falling stars were a daily or hourly occurrence. The icy landscape was broken with crater lakes, remnants of asteroid falls of dinosaur-extinction size, apparently falling with appalling frequency. It was a location only minds utterly indifferent to the chances of survival would select to plant a colony.
Their cold, low-gravity, diamond-bright world had a year some four hundred days long, but, unlike Nocturne, rotated with a ten-hour day, so the deracination ship could assume a geosynchronous orbit and lower its vast length like a space elevator, allowing a low energy method of ascent to orbit, and easy access to the seventeen large moons and countless smaller satellites crowding the world.
A single equatorial ocean cinctured the globe. Glacier covered the entire northern continent and the southern, sculpted into ghostly, fantastic shapes by high winds and low gravity. All was ice-locked save the belt of rugged seashore fjords and cliffs and narrow valleys where human fields and farms and walled towns grew. The golden domes and steaming spires of the seven competing ecological stations, placed among the precipices and crags of these fierce shores were now the seats of the world’s arrogant ruling clans, the Houses of Splendor.
The local life, a spongy seaweed and a plethora of colorful jellies, lichens, molds, and balloonlike invertebrates, was obliterated, and the chemical composition of the equatorial ocean-belt and atmosphere slowly changed to suit human needs, as bacteria, then spores, then arctic sea life, piscine then mammalian, was introduced, one layer at a time, carefully, slowly.
The Splendids waited with astonishing patience for uncounted years in airtight sanctuaries worshipping their frozen and slumbering forefathers, waiting for their environmental engineering to tame their world of icy seas and jagged rocks and constant meteor impacts. Their grandfathers emerged in pressure suits, their fathers in breathing masks, and they emerged in parkas, and danced and skated on the ice beneath the earthly pine trees in an unearthly world they had made their own.
The Splendids made it a point of pride never to biomanipulate their folk to match the environment, but always to coax and torment the world into matching the folk. The Chimera and Melusine among them were forced to breed with the Witches and Sylphs to produce a strange but sturdy hybrid called a Splendid: long-lived and light-boned with neural antennae for sending and receiving signals. The Giants and Locusts, outnumbered and unaggressive, were killed in hideous wars and massacres.
The proud, austere, and uncooperative Swans retreated to the regions of icy inland waste, far from the single sea, lost in glacier-torn and treeless tundra larger than the entire combined land mass of Earth, lost beyond the reach of any possible pogrom. There they altered their children to adapt to the environment as it then was, and erected de-terraforming stations antithetical to the attempts of the Splendids: these icy Swans survived in volcanic craters or deep valleys or caverns where the smog of the original atmosphere still tenaciously clung, in palaces grown from surviving native fungi or glued together from the opalescent bodies of the floating invertebrates. According to the rumor Del Azarchel heard from the domestic ghosts of the Seven Houses, the Swans were merely waiting for men to die, that they might emerge and claim the world.
Nor did the ghosts disagree. The cliometric calculus of their many environmental xypotechs showed that the world of Splendids would suffer environmental decay and dropping population rates across the millennia, unless a mass of people as large as the original forced migration was gathered here by the Twenty-fifth Millennium. If not, the world would fall below the minimal population numbers needed to maintain the atmospheric towers and oceanic infusion wells, causing environmental degradation and a return to the original atmospheric balance of gases, and causing death of the entire (and entirely artificial) Earth-like biosphere.
And the cold-eyed Swans of Delta Pavonis in their white-winged robes would emerge from their icy coffins in the wastelands, never smiling once, and live their lives of isolation, under once-more native skies filled with smokes and dripping airborne jellyfish equally poisonous to man, meeting only to mate, and building no tools, neither interstellar ships nor interstellar radios.
For many years Del Azarchel dwelt on the cold world of Splendor, for the planet lacked the ene
rgy richness needed to return him home. Then a worldwide war broke out, a grim absurdity on a world so desperately void and empty. Del Azarchel, aiding and betraying the ferocious warlords one after another, used his ship’s sails as orbital mirrors to melt and crack the glaciers where various armies hid, or sink the icebergs used as barges by their navies, or used his ship’s position to deflect meteors toward defenseless towns, until he was in able to decree himself supreme leader, nobilissimus and lord. When he commanded the cowering civilization to gather the resources needed to exile him back to Sol, gladly they obeyed.
The Emancipation towed the launching laser beyond their cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Tailfeather, the outermost planet of Delta Pavonis. The lonely laser lighthouse was manned by Swans and thinking machines with no loyalty to the Splendids, and by some miracle the laser beam did not fail during an entire decade of terawatt output.
Del Azarchel mounted no further expeditions to Delta Pavonis. The chances that the Swans, or, if not they, whosever unwise hands it might be that the transplutonian lighthouse of Delta Pavonis fell into next, would not turn the apocalyptically powerful laser against the planet Splendid, were very slim. Del Azarchel did not expect the colony to survive, and Montrose (for Del Azarchel after his return shared all his finding with him) expected no better.
There were no other destinations from which any radio messages returned, and so no other expeditions from Sol were launched.
All the other colonies from Proxima to 82 Eridani were dead, twisted half-human bodies of failed pantropic experiments unburied under atmospheres never quite terraformed to a proper breathable mix. Montrose heard the last words of the last survivors on the radio, at least of those colonists who had the wealth and will to build interstellar-range radio lasers.
Montrose lost interest in a lot of things, after that. The interstellar human civilization which was needed for Rania’s return was stillborn.
8. The Endarkening
A.D. 14600 TO 14990
After the interstellar radio silence fell, and nothing more was heard from Splendor of Delta Pavonis nor from Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani, Montrose augmented himself up to the level of Selene. The sudden clarity was blinding. All too clearly, he saw what was happening on Tellus: Mass ignorance spread as biological man became ever more dependent on his talking tools and talking beasts. Electronic man became ever more dependent on applications and appliances from higher up the mental ladder, from the servants of Jupiter. Some of the Ghosts Montrose met were illiterate. They were computers which could not add and subtract. Factions spreading an anti-intellectual cult—no one wanted to be like Jupiter—had won the day on three continents. Jupiter had already done everything, discovered everything, knew everyone, and knew how to run your life better than you did. There was not much point to anything.
Montrose, no matter how often he redid the calculations, found his cliometry showing that the human race in all its variations was going extinct, and the machines were being pushed by an evolutionary and economic pressure to ever fewer intellectual or self-aware functions.
For centuries, Montrose kept hoping stubbornly that he had made some error, overlooked some variable, or that Jupiter would somehow save mankind. But the time turned and turned again like a grindstone, and the cliometric slope bottomed out.
The knowledge that he had failed the task she had left him behind to do, that there would be no deceleration laser to stop Rania’s returning ship, and that, even had there been, no interstellar polity would exist to prove the human race were starfarers, eventually drove Montrose into self-imposed exile here.
But this mystery now followed him. The cliometry had never been wrong before. He had given up hope. Was there any cause for hope again?
9. Nonextinction Event
A.D. 22196
Montrose said, “Why ain’t the human race extinct? How did my cliometry go wrong?”
The biped mask said, “We ourselves are the historical vector you did not anticipate. Do you wish to recalculate your future history on the basis of minimal or no Swan influence on Firstling history?”
Montrose looked at the gold-coated creatures wryly. The beauty, the sheer physical grace of the Swans, was part of the reason for the human inferiority complex. That was not a factor with these ugly and wretched creatures. Montrose did not bring that up.
Just in his head, he could also see how the new factor of a race like this would play out. There were several mutually beneficial social interaction mechanisms Montrose could foresee. These creatures were servile enough that the crushing inferiority the Swans felt toward Tellus, or Tellus toward Jupiter, would not be a factor. The Firstling humans, from Sylphs to Melusine, would be inferior to these pathetic creatures only in certain respects, and only mildly. These Third Humans might as a whole be smarter than the First Humans, but the individuals lacked the shocking brilliance of the Swans. Ironically, the Thirds would act as an insulating layer protecting the Firsts from Jupiter.
Montrose spoke. “I don’t need no recalculation. I can see you are the product of a high-energy civilization. One that could not have come about on exhausted Earth. There is only one way that happened. Del Azarchel is the ‘Senior’ again because he found another Diamond Star, or some vast source of contraterrene. When was the ship launched?”
The biped said, “In a.d. 15077 we Myrmidons hollowed out the main belt planetoid 35 Leucothea, and affixed with lightsails and energy manipulation tackle, and coated the surface with picotechnological armor called argent, allowing the entire surface to enjoy the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force. This White Ship mass is roughly equal to the moon of Saturn, Hyperion, and the energy aura she can generate allows her to tow a mass far in excess of her own.”
“I know her destination was the M17, the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, five thousand lightyears away. Which star?”
The wheel said, “Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star.”
A helpful almanac stored in one of his brains helpfully provided that Kleinmann 1973 was a binary of two O-type stars, highly energetic short-lived stars of sixty solar masses, the center of an odd double-shelled nebula formation, and the source of immense X-ray vents.
Montrose, studying the astronomical data in this file concerning the odd pattern of energy discharges, was thunderstruck. It had been staring him in the face all the time, sitting here in an unexplored corner of his encyclopedia of memories. One of the two O-type stars in Kleinmann’s binary was made of positive matter. The other was obviously antimatter, for the inner shell of the nebula had been hollowed out by antimatter particles carried on the solar wind from the negative star, which, encountering the central mass of the nebula cloud, converted it to pure photonic energy, which, in turn blew the outer shell beyond the dangerous range of the negative star. Nothing else could account for the weird geometry of this hollow cloud of stardust.
Once again, the Monument Builders had placed their lure in the midst of an astronomical wonder; one which any starfaring race would be curious to go see.
“In April a.d. 20177,” said the centaur, “the visible output of Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star altered dramatically. This was the flare of the launching starbeam, pointed directly at Sol.”
This meant that the expedition within less than a year of arrival had successfully erected a launching laser and left behind a staff, biological or mechanical, to man it, and had launched the return mission immediately.
Montrose checked the astronomical records, found the change in stellar output. At the time, he had thought it was the variable star entering a higher period. But no, the explanation was that the staff remaining behind had remained loyal to their task for two thousand and nineteen years, despite the immense energy cost of shooting an interstellar-strength acceleration laser beam from one arm of the galaxy to another for two millennia. The sheer persistence was awe inspiring.
And, of course, someone, perhaps the Myrmidons of the asteroid belt or perhaps the Jupiter Brain, would be re
quired to power up a vortex in the sun and maintain a starbeam to decelerate the vessel for the second two thousand five hundred years of voyage, acting on schedule and pinpointing the position of the vessel. Montrose had little doubt one or both would be equal to the task.
Montrose revised his estimation of the Myrmidons upward. Perhaps Del Azarchel had designed a race with sufficient longevity to be the backbone of a starfaring civilization.
Montrose was momentarily struck with wonder. A human colony five thousand lightyears away. How long ago had Del Azarchel been planning that? Was it as far back as their first visit to Selene? Was that what he had been scanning the heavens for so diligently?
He said, “When did Blackie begin to think other Monuments might be around other stars? Stands to reason a hunter sets out more snares than one. Can you ask him?”
“We cannot,” said the biped.
“Aw, c’mon, you can break your orders for me. Bragging to me about how he outsmarted me is practically the only pleasure he has in life, the poor, wretched snot.”
“We cannot,” said the biped. “He departed.”
“What? Did he come with you partway and return back to the Inner System? I did not detect a second vessel launching from yours. No matter. Radio him. About eight hours round trip signal to Earth, this time of year.”
“You misconstrue. The Senior Del Azarchel accompanied the Second Expedition to the Omega Nebula,” said the biped. “He will not make landfall until a.d. 25177.”
“Damnation,” was all Montrose said.
The biped said, “I take it you understand the point? Components of the First Expedition left behind have been instructed to use the antimatter O-type star’s energy to create this second ultrasuperjovian-sized brain mass in his own image, and decipher the Omega Monument for himself. Since the Earth has already been discovered by the Hyades, he deduced that there would be no additional harm by disturbing this Omega Monument.”