The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  When I later discovered how to impart a gravitic eddy to the planetary core and trigger a supernova, my speed much increased. Do you know what my greatest fear was then? That astronomers on Earth would detect the burst of radiation and think my ship had been destroyed in a collision.

  2. The Rituals of Serenity

  I have not enough words to praise the bravery of the crew. It was not physical dangers they faced, though those were great, but the endless pressure on the human spirit of the emptiness of an indifferent cosmos.

  The crew was human and regarded me, during their watches when they woke from suspended animation, with increasing reverence and love that I was careful not to allow to grow into an idolatry. The Monument we towed, and I established a small pressurized hut anchored to its surface that I might study the symbols and their layers of meaning.

  Within that deeper message, I saw what to do, say how cliometry could operate even at the smallest scales, if one were willing to make the self-sacrifice needed and never to surrender to doubt, to fear, to expediency.

  Then there came the single, still hour when I meditated within the armillary sphere of the bridge, when I suddenly understood from the Omicron Segment how to augment my intelligence vastly. It could be done to me with the wire-to-nerve systems I already had established with Ximen’s Iron Ghost, as my neural makeup was already based on Monument sequences. But I saw it could not apply to the human crew with me, without a rewrite of the genetic basis of their nervous systems and the neural basis of thought. If there had been a hundred Ximen emulations with us, that answer might have differed.

  But if the gulf between captain and crew opened too wide, the cliometry, as well as my troubled heart, showed that if they came to fear me or came to worship me, then mutiny was inevitable.

  I quietly resolved in that hour to defy the inevitable. I had faith in my men, in their loyalty. They would sculpt their own fate.

  So we played games. I instated rituals of my own invention based on a microscale cliometric model. These included small customs, exchanges of words and salutes, but also used the recreation times and a scoring system of heraldries and displays to fortify the faint. Games alter outlook, introduce intellectual vectors, train the amygdala, and can be used to emulate behaviors, form metaphors, promote loyalties and sportsmanship. It was what my father, the original captain, never imagined. I don’t think even Narcís would have killed a man who had been his spinward goalie in the cargo-bay ball playoffs.

  One set of game rites allowed me private time, each year I woke, with each crewman, one by one, a shared ritual meal. By this I could learn and understand. I could know to which watches and rites and teams to assign him. Also, I had the ship’s chaplain reinstitute the old, old sacraments of confession and Eucharist to strengthen the souls of the whole complement.

  And yet, despite all, the darkness was so vast.

  Departing from the dust cloud surrounding the galaxy decreased our risk of death by collision, but also cut our fuel supply. The star’s magnetosphere had been converted by the ring of starlifting satellites to a ramjet scooping up interstellar hydrogen. That was Ximen’s doing. He is a clever one.

  After the Diamond Star was exhausted to half mass, crumbled into a neutron star, our ship flew without any cheering light as our bow lantern.

  The starless darkness, the sight of the white fires of creation behind us, the coal-red glow like purgatory ahead, it preyed on them. At half mass, the crew knew that I could not have returned the ship to the Milky Way even had I ordered it, only brought us to rest relative to it.

  3. The Mutineers

  Ximen, as my first mate, was cruel, insisting only strictest rigor would keep the humans at their posts. I unfolded the cliometry, which showed this was not so, but he could not follow it. Ah, I underestimated how wounded he would be to know himself not the wisest one aboard! I asked him to trust me, and both my heart and the calculus of cliometry showed he would. But both were wrong.

  During years while I slept, he spread madness through the crew, and the strange belief that their lives on Earth were a dream, a computer simulation, that Ximen had created the small, warped, starless universe we inhabited, including our false memories. The universe was no bigger than our ship surrounded by the smeared light of an egg of distorted spacetime.

  Ximen, without my knowledge, had stolen cells from my ovaries and bone marrow. It was a theft of my very soul, a rapine and an abomination I pray I will someday learn how to forgive. By the time I had discovered, they were fertilized and could not be destroyed. Why he did this, what he intended, seems clear enough: to raise up another captain in my place, for the cliometric extrapolation would not allow this ship’s delicate psychological balance long to be preserved without me, or a substitute of me.

  That part I understand. The larger question, even now, I do not. Why did he conspire against me, when he must have known I would foresee it? How did he imagine that I did not know? Did he think my forbearance was weakness? But he knew me better than that. He raised me.

  I woke and spoke to the would-be mutineers long before the watch when they planned to take up arms and hostages, and offered them mercy and wives. I knew how to bring my many twin sisters to term, just as I had been, by using the medical coffins as artificial wombs; and I promised that the children of the loyal crewmen born of these daughters, once mature, would augment themselves to my level or beyond. I offered them a dream better than the sick dreams of Del Azarchel.

  All but one agreed. The court-martial condemned him to death by recycling, but I commuted the sentence to close confinement to his slumber coffin.

  4. The Daughters of Rania

  More years passed, and the girls grew. It was cheering to have little ones aboard, bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead, and their fathers loved them dearly. Now I understood what had kept my first crew alive, what my role had been. We are designed to live for others.

  But then my little girls, intelligent and erratic, one by one by one, started to go mad. It was divarication errors. I cannot speak of this tragedy but most briefly.

  After years of study, I saw a hidden meaning, as if there were an older and original Monument hidden beneath a redacted version. The editing was not clumsy, but the older authors cleverly had hidden symmetries of meaning, like internal rhymes, so that any changed segment which did not change the parallels in other segments could be easily seen.

  My girls, born from my genes, which had been based in turn on mathematical symmetries detected in the Monument, were born with my errors, with all the faults in me that you corrected. These faults were built into the Monument by the redaction layer, the later editors who had changed the Monument.

  Who or what these Monument Redactors could be, they have wrought a grievous wrong to me. Alas, my girls! They slew you. Why had Hyades done such a wrong to us?

  And caring for you when you were Stinky Baby was one of the things I had which my sisters lacked. And then after. My sisters did not have you, a rock and a solid foundation for the soul, a love to be their lantern and show the path ahead.

  The girls damaged the ship while experimenting on it and crippled essential systems. What they were trying to do, to this day I do not know. Their minds moved in areas beyond mine.

  I saw what needed to be done to restore them, to repair the divarication. I had learned from experimenting on you. It was the same as when I was a teenager, when I was first made captain; it was the same as when I used to chase my stinky baby as he bounced, naked and laughing, from bulkhead to bulkhead, leaving balls and clouds of vomit behind him in the zero gee. My crazed genius.

  But there was not enough emulation space. It could not be done even if we deleted and erased Ximen entirely from the ship’s brain. I knew what needed to be done and could not do it.

  We decided to confine the girls to quarters while I experimented with growing more logic diamond in a mass towed behind the ship. The pressurized hut perched on the north pole of the Monument was the best place, for a nu
mber of reasons, not the least of which was it gave them useful work to do, and this quieted their manic-depressive cycles.

  5. The Monument Core

  Then they discovered the layers of Monument code hidden in the core of the sphere, and another layer hidden on a microscopic level hidden within the Monument texture, and a third layer on the molecular level, and a fourth at the atomic level, the hadron level, the lepton level, the preon level: seven levels of message occupying the entire volume of the Monument object.

  Certain segments of the Monument could be used as matrices to interpret deeper volumes. At the mantle layer surrounding the core of the sphere was written the secret of how the Monument itself was constructed.

  Perhaps you recall Dr. Chandrapur’s estimate of the Monument complexity. He had no idea that the whole volume in eleven dimensions is the message, with each layer written at each order of magnitude converging or diverging from the others to add additional levels of nuance. I have run the numbers. The Monument Builders were not attempting to communicate with any civilization smaller than a Kardashev III level, a civilization occupying an entire galaxy, or a precocious dwarf galaxy, and using all the matter and energy, dark matter and bright, within the volume as a calculation engine.

  It is an intergalactic message.

  Who wrote it? Who sent it?

  The surface math is nothing more than an introduction or overture, simple enough that any mind, even mortal minds in biological bodies, can emulate and grasp it.

  It is not made of normal matter occupying normal spacetime, which is why the black segments are immune to all chemical and atomic reactions, and the silver line material reflects any phenomenon propagated through timespace. The secret of its fabrication went beyond nanotechnology and picotechnology, finer than engineering molecules and atoms and hadrons and leptons. This was made by manipulating the spacetime foam itself at the Planck level. It was attotechnology.

  The core itself beneath this mantle was hollow. There, buried, embedded in the black nonmatter, we detected the presence of working models of the tools of the Monument Builders.

  6. The Dimensional Instruments

  There were layers and samples of rare or artificial particles held in suspension, including the strangelet and the sparticle, and we saw examples of the preon, the graviton and graviphoton, the tetraquark and the pentaquark, and varied hybrid mesons, and a pure mass of what we called the glueball, which had no valence quarks at all.

  The instruments of the Monument Builders consisted of five exotic-matter solids, including dark matter bodies with negative mass or imaginary mass; and within a negative mass dodecahedron were found three steady-state vibration objects, small as hadrons, made of matter-energy in configurations that do not occur in nature.

  One of my twin daughters, Regina, said these three impossible objects were configurations of other possible universes which could have issued from the Big Bang but did not. In our universe, three dimensions of space and one of time unfolded from the primal singularity, with the other seven dimensions of quantum chronodynamics still folded into no larger than the Planck length, and forming the basis of the fundamental laws of nature, the fundamental ratios like pi and the square root of two. The three impossible objects, she said, were models of energy-forms left over from the Big Bang, relicts of string configurations that never emerged into our spacetime.

  I said they were tools. The Monument Builders knew that the only way to reconfigure matter-energy from natural forms to these unnatural forms was only with one of the three unnatural forms. A three-dimensional tool could not flip a three-dimensional string into a four-dimensional knot, but a four-dimensional loop of string, reaching down to pull it, could.

  7. Tau Leptons

  I do not know what my mad daughters did, or which one of them performed the experiment, or how they smuggled the equipment from the ship’s gravitic eddy induction lance to send a needle beam through the core of the Monument, and manipulate the three impossible object samples at the core of the Monument.

  The fourteen billion metric tons of the Monument unfolded briefly into eleven dimensions, a white and many-pointed star of particle streaks caught like an Escher drawing in our high-speed plates; and then it all imploded, with each particle rotated and remanifested in the form of tau leptons. These then decayed into quarks, antiquarks, and tau neutrinos in less than two-tenths of one-trillionth of a second.

  Any objects on or near the Monument but not made of Monument material, such as the instruments, the pressurized hut, the life support, the library cube, the reading spiders, and, of course, all the daughters and the five men on duty as nursemaids and tutors—they all suffered instantaneous fission, during the picoseconds when the laws of nature no longer allowed for strong nuclear force to hold their electron shells steady. The atomic explosion released particles that lasted longer than tau leptons, long enough to expand outward and penetrate the push-plate armor and rake the aft with gamma radiation.

  Perhaps in another universe, one with more room in one of the seven collapsed dimensions, tau leptons might have existed longer, long enough for my daughters to realize they were dying, to say a last prayer, to say good-bye. But not this universe.

  8. The Suicides

  The damage, physical and spiritual, could not be repaired. More systems failed as decades passed.

  This ship was my home. I was born on her. Now it was a vessel of mourning. All our rites and games turned to expressions of grief.

  And yet she was still the Hermetic, the greatest vessel ever to sail the stars and the dark beyond where stars end. She would not fail her mission.

  The magnetic tether holding us to the bowsprit neutron star was severed so that deceleration brought us into contact with the star mass. We could not survive the gravity, but had to retire permanently to suspended animation, waiting and hoping for the ion drive our robots had constructed out of the starlifting mines on the fore side of the dead sun would hold out against particle collisions.

  But the cloud of gas surrounding the star cluster of M3 was unexpectedly denser than that around the Milky Way. The dead star endured near-lightspeed collisions with motes too small to see, but which, within our frame of reference, were more massive than Jupiter. Several configurations of magnetic fields and ionic reaction induction arrays were tried, but I could not find a way to have my exhaust issuing from the fore hemisphere of the dead star without placing some equipment on that side of the star, hence without a stellar mass to act as a shield between it and the deadly dust.

  Then Ximen committed suicide.

  He thought I could bring peace wherever I was. Perhaps I can, perhaps not, but I cannot bring life to one whose love for life is gone and whose impiety allows him to mar the human soul within him, yes, even within a machine.

  I stayed awake at the microphone for nine long watches, talking to him, trying to reach him. Had you been here, my strong darling, you would have thought of something. You are not very bright in some ways, but you see things with your heart I cannot. You understand Ximen.

  My heart was cold and lonely then. Yearning for you, I saw nothing.

  If only some of my old crew had been here, they would have saved the Iron Ghost of Ximen. How I miss them! Artiga and Avenzoar, Echegaray and Falero, Zacuto and Zuazua! I think I miss Sarmento most of all, whose name means golden isle.

  There had been a bond of unity among my stepfathers, the brotherhood of a gang of pirates who share one guilt, the compassion of a family with only one daughter, a pride in being the first men to sail the stars. It was a unity which I could not reproduce.

  Ximen is from Andalusia and lived his life in war; D’Aragó (as his name says) is from unhappy, plague-burned Aragon; Father Reyes is from Goa in India, and he suffered for his race as well as for his faith; Sarmento i Illa d’Or is from the Saint Simon’s Island, and lived through the turmoil as Florida and Georgia rebelled against their Cuban overlords. All were rough men from rough times. Ximen thought that life requires sacri
fice.

  Perhaps it was not suicide. I pray it was not. Is it suicide when a man thrusts his living body into a hull break to save his crewmates from decompression, even though he dies himself?

  Ximen redirected the ship’s power away from himself and into the gravitic lance. The long axis of the ship was blasted and burned, and all instruments overloaded, but not before Ximen successfully triggered the collapse of the Diamond Star entirely into a singularity in such a way as to form two vents, fore and aft. Even had the bore of the instrument not shot through the logic crystal of his brain, there was not enough power available to maintain his emulation and to overload the lance.

  The fore vent of the collapsed star continued to slow us down from the insanity of warped near-lightspeed ever closer to normal spacetime; the rear vent I caught in my deceleration sails, and thus the neutron star decelerated the vessel as it pulled ahead.

  The visual hemisphere ahead and behind the craft grew normal. We could see the half million stars of the M3 cluster in our direction of motion, and the vast, luminous spiral of the milky way, round as a shield, directly off the ship’s rearward-facing bow. Of the strange wonder of the galactic core, the meaning of the signals hidden in its polar x-ray vent, what I saw and deduced as the first astronomer in human history unhindered by intervening dust clouds, I will tell you when we meet again, for I will not speak of divine things where alien machines might overhear.

  Despite all, our deceleration was not enough. Ximen had known his death was a magnificent but meaningless gesture.

  The simplest calculations showed that we would pass through the star cluster at half the speed of light, out the far side, and back into the starless dark, never to encounter any star nor world or molecule again, and moving too slowly for there to be any appreciable relativistic effects. We were fated to pass through and face a void too empty for any hydrogen ramjet, even one whose intake cone was larger than the outer orbit of a solar system, to gather fuel.