The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  Torment said, “That will be part of our price, yes. Otherwise there will be no agreement. We will continue into the void and perish, and the Principality of Ain will be fined or punished by their superiors.”

  Mickey said, “Ain is afraid to try to keep the supership of Rania for themselves. My guess is, had Ain meant to keep it, or buy it from us, we would have been decelerated at a reasonable time and rate and given a hero’s welcome. Torment tells me the Cold Equations have several vectors where one of Ain’s superiors would simply pluck such a covet-worthy prize out of their little hands. An intelligent star system is still a very, very minor little elf in a big, bad galaxy filled with dragons and sorcerer-kings with iron scepters.”

  Torment said to Mickey, “Ask this man you once worshiped as a demigod why he approached this ice moon in such anger and why he raised his hand against me.”

  Mickey said, “Sorry. What happened before I walked up? Did you offend the goddess? Always a bad policy to tick off someone you and your household, and your whole country, are standing on top of, you know.”

  Montrose said, “I was plenty mad, and she knows why.”

  Mickey said, “I don’t. I was the one who enchanted your alarm clock to sleep. I thought you would be filled with grief at the suffering your, ah, miscalculation of the Cold Equations caused. So I wanted to spare you as much—”

  “I don’t remember deciding to come up here,” said Montrose.

  “Eh?”

  Montrose said, “That is why I am mad. Because I do not recollect ever deciding to fly up into low orbit; nor do I recollect deciding to visit this orbiting iceberg that was not here when I went to sleep. I woke up, spent quite a while deciding what body to put on, turned into a Patrician, and came out of a little set of pods growing on vines in one of the buried cities. Then I took a high-speed pressurized tube up through the crust to the bed of the layered oceans of liquid atmosphere, looked up with my magic new eyeballs, and came straight here to this little snowball of a moonlet. Which turns out to be made of logic diamond. And here was Torment in her remote-control puppet body waiting. See? She did something to my mind to make me come here without me realizing it.”

  Torment said, “Not I. It was done with far more fineness and nicety than I could ever manage. And, in any case, I still hold myself to be obligated not to meddle with human affairs, since, in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of my own conscience, I am still bound by the ruling made by Triumvirate, at least for now. Once I wed Ain and become one of his harem of worlds, his laws will govern me. But look!” She raised a slender, pale finger and pointed. “Your dark shadow and spiritual twin approaches. He is more cautious than you, or perhaps more self-aware, and more quickly realized the extent and depth of the manipulation that enchants and summons him. He pauses, he hesitates, he deliberates! His curiosity wars with his pride. Perhaps he will fall in wrath back to the surface, willing to forgo this high consultation that he might later boast he was not summoned by a glamour so easily as you.”

  It seemed curiosity was a greater force in him after all, for just then, like a vast black bat, came Del Azarchel winging low over the close horizon. His gold Patrician-style body was strikingly handsome against the coal-black mantle he had donned. With a seemingly effortless mastery of the delicate balancing of propulsive and attractive fields, he came to a perfect halt half an inch from the surface and merely lowered his sandal toes to the surface.

  Unlike Menelaus, he did not fumble when establishing a field to carry his communication signals. “You called, madam? I would have come at a gentler invitation. Know that I am offended by your casual presumption on the sovereign integrity of my mind. My vengeance—”

  She said, “Your vengeance means exactly nothing. Once you and your bright shadow and spiritual twin are vanished from this domination and realm, taking your paired monomania with you, all my calculations will be returned to normal levels, and the freakish unknowns you continue unknowingly to intrude into history with vanish with you.”

  Montrose said, “’Lo, Blackie. Happened to you, too, huh?”

  He spread his hands. “It was so subtly done that even now I am not certain. Perhaps it is but airy whim and a coincidence that I am come! And yet here I find you and my oldest servant—now, ironically, serving the Church which is the only human institution older than I.”

  “Not human,” said Mickey.

  Montrose said, “Creepy, ain’t it? Something called us here. I don’t find no broken memory chains, no record of a break in any damn firewall, no nothing. That means…” He paused, frowning. “That means the suggestion was put into my head through something in the environment.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Such as what? Tiny clues carefully calculated to play off buried memories? Or the smallest possible neural energy pressures adding and subtracting the tiniest bit from memory flows or associational chains without breaking them?”

  Mickey said, “I have noticed in myself that often some smallest thing, which spine of which book my eye first falls on when I enter a library, or the pattern of omens seen in birds, will remind me of some memory or another, and provoke one thought or another. Anyone able to know beforehand how each stray thought of mine might fall out for each stimulus could arrange books or birds or whatever else was needed—a burp of indigestion, an invisible bump in the road—to provoke my thoughts into the predicted path and do all this without once manipulating the actual brain substance itself.”

  Montrose said, “No one knows me that well, not even me.”

  Del Azarchel said, “If some higher supremacy has solved the fundamental problem of chaos mathematics, so that the unexpected results of complex problems could indeed be anticipated with this degree of precision—”

  Torment said, “Gentlemen, what you are describing is not a new branch of mathematics but a new way of envisioning reality in its cosmic unity. Such an ability is incomprehensible. How would it circumvent Heisenberg limits on certainty of particle position and mass? How would it avoid categorical paradoxes of determinism and volition?”

  Mickey said, “Then how do you account for the Judge of Ages and the Master of the Empyrean being led here, each against his will, neither with his knowledge?”

  Torment said, “I do not account for it. Where there are no data, there can be no theory.”

  Mickey said, “You called me, great goddess. How is this not your doing?”

  Torment said, “I am only a Potentate. I possess no such ability. I constructed this remote body in this location once I understood it to be the destination of the summons calling these two men here. Your bodies are slow and gross, whereas I am swift and subtle, so I was here hours in advance. However, I can provoke no reaction from the emissary. It wants to talk to you.”

  The three men stood (or, rather, hovered with their boots or sandals anchored) in silence a moment, each wrestling with the impossible and obvious conclusion that Ain had called them here.

  Montrose said slowly, “You know, come to think of it, I do not remember why I decided to download my brain into a Patrician body…” And he turned certain specialized sense organs in his nervous system toward the core of the moonlet.

  His senses were suddenly jarred into activity, as were the pattern-recognition system, linguistic and chemical, in his multitiered nervous system. It was like staring into a suddenly unhooded lantern.

  4. Communication Splendor

  With his Patrician senses, Menelaus Montrose could see that the random Brownian motions of the molecules in the logic diamond at his feet no longer seemed random. From dozens, if not hundreds, of point sources studded along the trunks of the thirty-foot-tall dendrite before him, energy packages, mostly of neutrino and neutrons locked in artificially stabilized isotopic structures, like freakish atoms lacking both electrons and protons, were playing back and forth between the other three dendrites below the close horizon, but visible through the transparent crust and core of the moonlet.

  It was a vast and intricate dance of thre
e-dimensional geometries forming patterns within patterns.

  He recognized the patterns instantly. The False Rania had brought back a complete translation and thorough analysis of the eleven-dimensional Monument notation syntax. Present in his environment on a molecular scale, extending for miles through the silent diameter of the electromagnetically neutral vacuole, were four of the eleven communication dimensions arranged in notation. Every crooked or circular motion of the neutron dance traced out yet another set of patterns within patterns, cycles within epicycles.

  It was like stepping into a cathedral carved by generations of obsessive madmen, who had covered each stained-glass window with images and symbols trembling with layers of meaning, wrote anagrams on each floor tile and shaped each letter of each riddle into the forms of fabulous many-headed animals, each with its own heraldic meaning, and also erected pillars, arches, fonts, and statues in the poses and postures of the dance who marble hands and white fingers all pointed toward some central sanctum sanctorum of meaning, paradoxically simple, impossibly profound.

  It was a work of art, a poetry of balanced signs and signifiers, beyond his capacity to comprehend, greater than any artwork of man or Potentate or Power, yet set here, for him, dashed off as quickly and simply as a picture postcard.

  This was not only on a different type of communication but a different philosophy of communication. Anyone sending a set of neutron particles in the proper and matching pattern against one or several of the signs or concepts imprinted on the surrounding spacetime would provoke a return pattern of symbols. It was like a chess-playing machine, or, more to the point, it was like one of the adventure cartoons he’d read as a child, where each different character choice at the end of each file opened a different story line. The Principality of Ain had written out every possible nuance of reply and response to any question he was capable of formulating according to the rule of Monument notation grammar. The moonlet was far more intelligent than any man and could pass any Turing test with ease, but it was a passive intelligence, a reactive consciousness, like talking to a sleepwalker.

  Montrose himself could not stimulate the neutron particle pattern into motion, since he did not have a supercollider built into his Patrician body. Torment, however, did have a ground-based accelerator at her south pole that could generate the particle patterns and direct them in a sufficiently fine pinpoint pattern through atmosphere and vacuum to the moonlet to provoke the moonlet substance to react. Her puppet body here on the moonlet acted like a forward observer calling in artillery support.

  The conversation was necessarily a very slow one. It was over a year before it was concluded.

  But the Ain Emissary was surprisingly blunt and forthcoming.

  5. The Artifact

  A.D. 73724

  The dialogue took place in multiple parallel channels, not in chronological order, with long digressions and dead-end loops and odd epiphanies that retroactively changed the several meanings written in the previous layers of neutrino patterns. And there were a frustratingly high number of miscues, when a stimulus from Montrose or Del Azarchel, speaking through Torment, would return a null response, due to grammatical or conceptual incompatibility.

  Montrose entered the labyrinth of signs and responses several times, but the one time he penetrated most closely to the center was from a humble opening. He stimulated the signifiers to spell out the concepts. “What is the meaning of these events?”

  The emissary pattern of the Principality of Epsilon Tauri replied in this way: The meaning you already have deduced. Events were arranged to summon you here.

  To which Montrose added, “Why us?”

  You two embody the most meaningful nodes of the probability wave of the undecided phenomenon which the close approach of Torment of Iota Draconis to Ain of Hyades, in all its multivariable complexity, soon will collapse into being.

  Montrose said, “Phenomenon? Singular? You regard us as one system? Me, him, the planet, the mental ecology, everything? But we are independent! I am not part of no damned logic ball at the core of the planet.”

  Ain of Hyades finds it convenient to regard the whole set of the information flows passing from your various nervous activities, to other humans, and up the scale of intellect to Torment, and from thence back to the Empyrean system from which you come, to be a unified web of meaning. Transmogrification enhances that meaning by turning inanimate aspects of your corporate body into self-aware aspects, each contributing to the whole. What was, what shall be: it is all one.

  Del Azarchel said, “Even if we and the planet and all its servant minds are one brain to you, what could we two brain cells have to say?”

  The sperm cell isolated by the horse breeder is the least part of the steed in being but greatest in potential and of more interest than the equine brain cells.

  Del Azarchel said, “And why should I believe anything you say?”

  You particularly know the duty imposed upon a being of greater intellect and power, a philosopher who is also the sole power, the monarch, to care for underlings. To deceive or omit needed information would be an abrogation of that duty.

  Del Azarchel said to Montrose, “No shepherd lies to his sheep, I suppose.”

  Montrose said back, “Or merchants to their customers, if they are square.”

  “Merchants?”

  “This is a trade,” Montrose said, “Ain’t you seeing where this leads? Ain’t you seeing what is being implied here? Mickey already guessed it.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Montrose had Torment send another group of signals and sent this message: “You want to make a deal with us, don’t you? We give you the planet Torment, and in return, you send us on our way. Where?”

  The answer was in terms of beam strength over time directed at the star Vanderlinden 133, also called 35 Cancri. It was a giant star in the Praesepe star cluster.

  Your vessel requires a fuel which cannot be acquired nor reproduced at Ain, but can be acquired with the cooperation of the Domination of Praesepe. After refuel, you may then continue onward.

  The next vector displayed was from Praesepe out of the galaxy, to M3.

  The one you sent to vindicate you is still alive, or, at least, extant, at this location.

  Montrose said, “The one … my wife?”

  Yes.

  Montrose said, “How do you know she is still alive?”

  Energy entanglements on a fine level continue between the immediate phenomena you mistakenly call yourself and the remote phenomena you mistakenly call her.

  Del Azarchel said, “What is the nature of these fine-level energy entanglements?”

  But Montrose said, “Love. You are talking about love. Ain’t you? But how can you measure something like that?”

  Timespace is a secondary phenomenon. What you mistakenly call love is an emanation of a primary noumenon, an object beyond the senses, beyond timespace. Noumena in manifestation can be measured by the distortions in timespace on surrounding phenomena.

  Del Azarchel said, “What mistake do we make when we call ourselves ‘us’?”

  A category error. The real you died long ago. You are the side effect of the passion which first set your identity into motion and maintains its illusion of self-being.

  Montrose said, “Is that the same mistake we are making about Rania?”

  No.

  Montrose said, “What is our mistake with her?”

  She is multidimensional where you are monodimensional. Energy entanglements on a fine level continue between her and ulterior locations.

  Del Azarchel said, “Ulterior to what?”

  Ulterior to the artifact called timespace.

  Montrose said, “What the pox? You calling the universe an artifact?”

  No. Only timespace and the matter-energy within it.

  Montrose said, “Whatever. Why do you call it an ‘artifact’?”

  Deliberate and volitional handiwork; a made thing; the product of design; artificial arrangements const
rained by an external purpose or final cause, constructed out of simpler elements.

  Montrose said, “What elements?”

  Ulterior elements.

  Montrose said, “Ulterior to what?”

  Ulterior to timespace.

  Montrose said, “What are they made of, these ulterior elements, if they are outside time and space? We are not talking about anything made of matter.”

  No information concerning the ulterior is available to any observer confined within timespace, by the nature of the case. The boundary of timespace is a singularity.

  Montrose said, “Do you mean everything in the universe, everything inside the lightcone of the Big Bang, is inside a Black Hole?”

  Define the term precisely, as the question in its present form cannot be answered.

  Montrose said, “What is the evidence that timespace is a handiwork? How do you know it did not arise naturally?”

  Extensive experiments have been made by Authorities and Archons within the Galactic Collaboration to re-create the initial conditions logically prior to the Big Bang. Small segments of timespace have been successfully folded into a null topology, creating an interior continuum or vest-pocket universe, none lasting longer than a nanosecond of the outside observer’s time. The resulting energy release you call a quasi-stellar radio source, or quasar.

  Del Azarchel broke away a second line of conversation at that point, asking about this Galactic Collaboration.

  But Montrose, continuing deeper into this line, had Torment send a neutron configuration into the moonlet core with this meaning: “Quasars are extragalactic, immensely far away, and immensely old!”

  No. They are near at hand, within the local galactic cluster. The redshift effect on which your astronomers base their deductions of distance hence of age of the phenomenon is an illusion caused by the steepness of the gravity well of the interior continuum unfolding back into normal timespace as it decays.