“The fault is yours, Menelaus Montrose. Even one of your limited intelligence surely saw that when you made us, creatures of perfect liberty, perfect independence, perfect individuality, you condemned us. Can it be you do not apprehend it, even now? The only way surely to be immortal is to join the Noösphere, to submerge oneself into the computer unity, and the Swans grew too proud, too fiercely individualistic, for that; the majority of us unplugged, and fled and became hermits. But the only beings concerned with the long-term destiny of mankind are immortals.
“The war, for the Swans, is over, and events many millennia hence will trouble us no longer, we who will be dust long before. Why should we sacrifice? For you? Did you make us to serve your good, and lose our own? Did you not use us as a mere instrument? Did you not create us, our race, our psychology, our way of life, as nothing more than a checkmate in your endless war of wits against your rival who stands here before me?
“Enough! The Eremitic Order represents a nobler cause. Liberty is our god. We serve no other, not you, Montrose, not your war aims, not your strange dreams of remotest futures.
“It is not meet that free men should perish for the service of others, or perish for tomorrows no child of ours will ever see.”
6. Caliban and the King
The august voice continued, full and awful as a tolling bell.
“Ximen del Azarchel, do not speak! Undo that smile you hide. The blame is yours as well, madman!
“Del Azarchel, everything you dreamed was in vain. It was utmost folly. You must understand that the expedition sent by Epsilon Tauri was sent in vain.
“The existence of the antimatter star at V 886 Centauri, and the Monument in orbit around it, was a lure, meant to attract the attention of a starfaring race.
“But consider the odds. Consider the math. That star was fifty lightyears away from Earth. Practically in our backyard. No. Practically in our pocket.
“The statistical odds that the Monument would just so happen to be so nearby to a primitive and backward race that even they could reach it is astronomically small—too small for the Hyades seriously to have contemplated the possibility.
“It was an accident.
“Had the Monument been at a reasonable distance away, thousands of light years, we never would have noticed and been lured by the contraterrene, much less have gone there and tripped their alarm.
“Imagine the analogy, Del Azarchel. Suppose that Spain at her height sent out messengers to all her colonies worldwide, from the East Indies to the West Indies, California to Argentina, Zanzibar to Goa to Naples, inviting them to gather their greatest warships and galleons at Cadiz, and some rude savage as naked and backward as Caliban from Prospero’s Island intercepted the message, understood only the first few letters of the first word, and answered—but only because he was at Rota, seven miles across the bay from Cadiz, and was able, straining his every resource to the utmost, perhaps with friends, to paddle his crude dugout canoe across the waters.
“Let us picture Caliban to be precisely as successful as the Hermetic expedition. You wear the uniform of that bloodstained ship: are you proud of it? Let us say Caliban’s canoe has two crew, call them Tarzan and Mowgli, and let us say, as happened with the Hermetic expedition, two thirds of the ship’s complement die in the travail, or are murdered, and the wretched survivor cannot reach Rota again without stealing resources from Cadiz.
“And let us say further, that Rota is so vile and barbaric that even a Caliban, enriched and armed with merely one canoe-load of stolen loot, can make himself for a season overlord of his starveling tribe.
“And to secure his reign, he prevents any further trips to Cadiz for additional supplies, or arms, or firearms, which had been the only hope of the wretched starvelings of Rota to survive should the great Monarch of Spain direct his eyes against the petty thief, or send his humblest man-at-arms. Or do you rather think the King of Spain will grant Caliban an audience for answering a message meant for His Majesty’s viceroys and admirals?
“Is this not the horrid history of the Hermetic, O thou most arrogant Hermeticist? Is it not a fair picture of your administrative philosophy, and of the survival rate of those unfortunate enough to be caught in your wake?
“Fool! The antimatter star was meant to attract the attention of entities such as those the Monument describes. It was meant for self-aware star systems who maintain continuous mental communication across interstellar distances, stars enshelled in multiple concentric Dyson spheres; and these megascale structures in turn are merely cells in brains the size of star clusters thinking large, slow thoughts. The tendrils reaching from the nebula and the archipelagoes of cloud and sunless planets streaming through the void show intellectual patterns, and form subordinate entities, larger than solar systems, reaching from star to star, cluster to cluster, and serving greater minds yet.
“The Monument’s message was meant to lure these Dominions and Dominations, Hosts and Principalities and Virtues. It was not meant for people. It was meant for living nebula and sapient star clusters. A self-aware planet like Tellus is merely a speck on this scale. In the days when the Hermetic expedition set out, Tellus was not even awake, and the core was a dead lump.
“The ambush of the Diamond Star was meant for bigger game. A shrew has been snared in a bear-trap. We men have not yet colonized our nearest interstellar neighbor, Proxima. Nay, we have not yet colonized even our nearest interplanetary neighbor, Mars.
“All human history from that expedition to this war was a mistake. It was all an error.”
At this point, the Swan closed the eyes of his face as if in memory of pain, and lowered his wings.
7. War and Rumors of War
Montrose’s ugly face was distorted with a look of grimacing guilt, for it seemed he believed the Swan’s accusation, and Del Azarchel’s handsome face was made handsomer by the fire in his eyes, for it seemed he did not.
The Swan spoke again. His voice was dry of all emotion.
“Hear what you need to know of the war, and learn your place. First, learn that it was no war. We were rats, and we swam out to meet the ironclad warship which loomed in the harbor, and we jarred our teeth on the hull. That was all.
“We dubbed the Virtue Asmodel, after the governing angel of Taurus, and its measured intellectual range was an order of magnitude above the Potentate of Tellus. Even had all the mass of Earth been converted to sophont matter and logic diamond, the black gas giant was fourteen times our mass: theirs was roughly the brain mass of a man as compared to that of a rhesus monkey.
“Asmodel was a Uranian mass with an hydrosphere of picotechnological murk black as ink, black as the pupil of an all-seeing eye, with an atmosphere as filled with fleets and storms and swarms of nanite diamond, auxiliary machines, and operatives, as Venus is with cloud. The whole mass was the shape of a vast convex, forming a sail absorbing the trailing light from Ain. When the mass passed the orbit of Pluto, it collapsed into a globe of storms, ringed with bands of darkness; and it fell toward Sol, assuming a highly elliptical orbit. Its albedo was so low that we lost track of it.
“Then, in A.D. 10920, the core of Asmodel ignited like a small, failed star, and the clouds emerging from the explosion formed streamers reaching toward the planets of the inner system, and the larger asteroids.
“It was searching for evidence of our interplanetary colonies, and found … nothing.
“The core of Asmodel went dark again, and major part of the uranian mass solidified once more, and shrank as it approached aphelion, becoming a body only twice Earth’s diameter, an egg of smooth crystal, and its atmosphere was a banner behind it long as a cometary tail. From the energy traffic, we deduce this tail was its periscope, the source of its observation across the interplanetary distances of our doings. But it also acted as a launch accelerator, for it shot silver tool-swarms into orbit.
“As it swung past Sol in sub-mercurial orbit, these swarms constructed ring-shaped devices, which it dropped into the sun,
partly made of matter, partly of energy, partly of something more dense than neutronium we cannot see nor analyze.
“The uranian mass sent murk like shadows to swarm over our machines and battle-asteroids, and although our nanotechnology could control material at a molecular level, we could neither detect nor deflect attacks which disintegrated atomic bonds. Our weapons fell to dust.
“We flung the moons of Phobos and Deimos, using a magnetic monopolar linear accelerator, at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light at the incoming mass. Nothing known to our science could have halted them: even disintegrating them to their constituent elements would not check the mass-energy of their velocity. Something not known to our science, a frame-dragging effect caused by the core of the dark gas giant rotating at the speed of light pulled the moons into a parabolic orbit, and as if in mockery, the living planet Asmodel restored them to their exact orbits and epochs around Mars.
“We expended the utmost of what we could in nuclear and thermonuclear and antimatter bombardments, kinetic, energetic, informational, chemical, molecular, nanotechnological packages—it all fell into an atmosphere as deep as that of a gas giant, creating flares of lights and refracted rainbows.
“Do you think ships of the greater races would have hulls? No. Atmospheres destroy incoming rubbish, matter or antimatter, more effectively.
“And yet we fought on! Magnificent and futile, yet we fought!
“What point was there to empty all Earthly arsenals into clouds that generate tornadoes into whose each eye five Earths could fall, or that spin out thunderbolts whose blasts more than exceeded our mightiest warheads? And if there were any headquarters, brain, or master node within the gas giant, or in his core or cloud or inky oceans, we missed it.
“Asmodel moved next its mass between Earth and the sun, and resumed its vast, thin, concave shape. It had raised its sail. That was all it did or needed to do. It put up a parasol, and let the world freeze.
“The sun was dark, and there was moonlight no more, and the murk came from space like black rain. All the waters of the atmosphere fell as snow and hail to solid seas, and soon all the gases of Earth’s atmosphere began to condense.
“In the same way a medieval castle would gather all the suburbs behind its gates and walls to withstand the siege, when Earth was besieged by darkness, we gathered all the surface civilization, and as much of the oceanic civilization as we could, and drew them underground.
“Had we not practiced? Had we not prepared? Everything was calculated to a nicety. We had supplies, greenhouses, geothermal heat, an artificial biosphere, systems for placing massive numbers into biosuspension. Assuming normal population growth rates, we should have been able to preserve the underground warrens and kept essential personnel alive for eighty years. Three generations of siege!
“And the besiegers waited eighty-one years.
“Perhaps we could have retooled, altered our psychologies, designed new forms of life better suited to the task, but not without spending resources allotted to feed the starving. Not without changing our individualistic and egotistic neuropsychology. Not without sacrificing the poor.
“So the psychological pressure of life in a warren for such independently minded men, with every bite of food, every breath of air rationed, in the end, was too much. The population fell. We did not have enough in numbers to maintain our midlevels.
“Our minds were broken by factions. The people rebelled. Systems broke down.
“Then the Virtue Asmodel directed a beam of energy from the sun through the core of the planet and out the other side. It slowed the core rotation, altered the magnetic properties of the planet, and, more significantly, cooled the interior of the globe. At one blow, our geothermal heat that powered our civilization was insufficient to maintain thought-activity in the Noösphere. The foe collapsed the source of power we thought was independent of the sun.
“We tried to flee, to escape the long shadow of Asmodel, by bending that same energy beam and propelling the world into another orbit far from its blockade—I need not tell you how absurdly, how impossibly delicate that matter was. You gentlemen are both duelists. Throw a raw egg into the air, and shoot it with a bullet, just grazing the egg so gently that you can deflect its fall without breaking the shell. To move this globe was the single greatest mathematical and engineering feat the human mind has ever conceived, and it was done perfectly.
“Why was it so perfect? Because we Swans, we exemplars of independence and wild, mad thinking, full of gaiety and boldness, we had already been expelled from the planetary mind core by our own exile. The damaged mind of Tellus was usurped by one mind, endlessly reiterated, found in the archives, and all the lesser minds in the mental ecology, the ghosts of Sylphs and Locusts and Melusine and all the lordly dead of the First Humanity gathered to this new Tellus and exalted him.
“When Earth fell into her new orbit, Asmodel, following, again took up position between us and the sun, but now the great concave became transparent, a focusing lens, and Asmodel heated the atmosphere from solid to gas.
“We discovered only then that some of the substance had crossed the void between Asmodel and Earth in the form of liquid picotechnology we call murk. It fell as meteors through the atmosphere, and then as cloud vapor, then as deluge, drowning certain villages and patches of valley even before we had been able to evacuate underground. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people were perfectly safe, perfectly frozen, as well as plants, spores, seeds, grubs, worms, and all the minutia needed to restart and restore the ecology.
“It was done with effortless, godlike elegance. The calculation times we estimate they took just to block out the chaos math needed to foretell the revitalization of the ecology are staggering: it would be like a juggler assembling a ticking pocket watch in midair, all the parts and gears and springs and levers moving, all the motions coming together at just the right time to be self-sustaining.
“Asmodel breathed the Earth back to life. The Slumberers in the murk woke in fury to greet a population already exhausted with war and eager to surrender.
“Next, Asmodel inscribed the runes onto the moon. We cannot read the message. It is akin to the Monument notation, but a more complicated recursive version, as calculus would be compared to arithmetic. If it is their intelligence test, we have failed it.
“Then the Virtue lowered fourteen skyhooks from orbit to the surface, and both those who wanted to continue the fight and those who were eager to surrender were swept up.
“The black liquid flowed from the base of the great towers who walked, surrounded by storm clouds, across the face of the earth, and burrowing down into the tunnels leading to the buried cities, tearing roofs open to wild blue sky.
“By certain signs painted in the heavens, Asmodel showed to all parts of the globe the numbers of population needed. Those who wished to end the agony of Earth fled toward the moving mouths of the skyhooks—we could not see and stop them! The Second Humans were blinded by the madness of Montrose, and stood helpless as the millions rushed toward slavery and death!
“We do not regard you humans of lesser intellect to be pets. You were our children. With minds like ours, we could remember and cherish every nuance of personality, we understood you so much better than you understand yourselves! But when you unplug from the Noösphere, and seek isolation, you turn into a phantasm and fade like a shadow. We are not sure who of our beloved children tarry on the globe, and who were turned to black ice and taken up the towers into darkness.
“Those who fled away from the skyhooks vowed horrible vows of retaliation, ants from trampled anthills cursing mastodons. Those vows still live. In fury our children who linger here on Earth tear at each other: we are aware of the wars they fight, but the legal nicety of the phantasm protocol renders us unable to interfere. Perhaps that is best, because otherwise we would apply the stern correction as the wrathful gods once did who sank Atlantis or burned Sodom and Gomorrah.
“Decades were spent by Asmodel in consu
ming the billions of Earth. Children were born and raised in the shadow of topless towers, the rivers running black with murk, and knew no other world. Can you gentlemen contemplate the numbers involved in planetary colonization? We estimate that between a half to two-thirds of the world population was taken.
“One day, the skyhooks rose into space. As they rose, they rebuilt themselves to assume the form of vast lightsailing vessels of design so perfect, solutions of engineering so elegant, that only nature’s hand who made the butterfly and the ostrich, the stallion and the hippopotamus could possibly compare, or the design of the seashell, or the perfection of the rose.
“The sun, tormented by the alien technology, now sent out her beams from certain points in the photosphere, permanent sunspots. Coherent light issues from those dark spots on the face of the sun and, undimmed by lightyears, establishes bridges of pure light across the wide interrupt of interstellar void. Away the vessels fled, softly as thistledowns on the breeze, as delicate as the petals of the cherry blossom trees when they fall after so brief a bloom.
“We lost more people than the Black Plague lost out of Europe. Earth is empty, and there are too few of us to maintain what we now have of civilization. We will fall back to the condition men lived in back when men were mortal, or fall back on atomic energy or powers even more primitive, or use calculation machines that are not self-correcting nor self-aware. The nightfall of barbarism is at hand.
“For the sake of honor, for the sake of sanity, I renounce it all.
“We have watched over the world and were found wanting; we fought and failed. We are not high enough to serve the Hyades even as beasts of burden. Half our globe was despoiled. No social order can survive in the face of such loss. I foresee lesser men shall strain with magnificent futility against the nightfall of all the lamps of civilized life, as one by one the candles die. But that struggle will never be mine. Except for lamentations, the race of the Swans is done.”