The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  Montrose answered with an obscenity.

  Del Azarchel said archly, “Do you recall how difficult it was to come to the attention of Ain, who was merely rated at an intelligence level of one billion? Praesepe includes cognitive masses three times the size of Hyades, organized more finely and coherently, and must be in excess of an intellect of one quadrillion. One thought would require sixteen lightyears to travel from one end of Praesepe’s brain systems to another. Have you studied the mathematical models of how bureaucracies and security systems must work? No matter how well they are designed, there are certain innate limits to how decision-making systems can be organized in a hierarchy, to keep information distortion losses at an acceptable level. Run the math using a quadrillion-level decision as a model; make it a simple yes-no decision, requiring very little oversight, but assume a confirmatory decision loop at every maximal node point in the game structure. Do you see?”

  Montrose ran through a few million calculations in his head, then opened his eyes and said, “Is that how you overcame and absorbed all the other minds swimming in the vast mind ecology of Jupiter? You were able to outmaneuver their decision-action structure?”

  But, a moment later, Big Montrose said, “Blackie has been thinking about how to corrupt and suborn intelligences superior to his own since the very beginning, starting with Rania when she was six or seven, or back when I was aboard the Hermetic, out of my mind from mental overload. That is how he kept Exarchel loyal for as long as he did. His system of subversion, I would guess, is based on finding short paths and shortcuts through the neural hierarchy.”

  Del Azarchel was scowling.

  Montrose said, “Short paths?”

  Big Montrose must have anticipated the question, because his answer came before the five-second delay for the message to meet him had run. “Remember how the doctor can make your knee jump from the tap of a rubber hammer? Or a frog’s eye cannot see motion that ain’t nothing like the vibration of a fly? Your leg or the frog eye makes a local decision, because a short path does not go all the way up to your cortex and lay out the pros and cons and ask for a rational decision and then come all the way back down to the knee. Nope, the lowest level of the hierarchy operates by its own logic.

  “Call it the logic of levels,” Big Montrose continued. “Blackie was not kidding when he talked about taking over the whole Collaboration organizing the galaxy. If you understand the logic of levels, you can take over anything, if you are patient and persistent.

  “Look at me. I took over Cahetel!” Big Montrose concluded. “Me, I was merely a subpersonality, kept in a holster like a tool, whenever and if ever Cahetel thought me useful. But he had a short path in his lower-level decision making. It was an instinct to hide and wait. It was a weak spot.”

  Montrose said, “Cahetel was made by a race of trap-door spiders. Ambush predators. What the hell is Blackie talking about, Big Montrose, when he says you are about to be killed for our sake?”

  Big Montrose said, “I am the only one who can bring you to the attention of the Domination of Praesepe, because, when I report in, I can finally confess to them that I am not Cahetel but that I was taken over by Montrose. That has to be brought to the attention of this highest level of Praesepe, the cortex and not the nerve tissue in the kneecap, so to speak.”

  “How did you take over Cahetel?” asked Montrose.

  Four floating fairies bent their bodies sideways to pantomime lips in a grin. “Del Azarchel can tell you the details of how it is done, because it is what he did to take over all the many levels of brains in Jupiter. You work hard, you buy a few of the weaker personalities who are willing to swap short-term resources, memory, and appliances for long-term ones. You hack into some others, undermine them, make them look bad to nodes higher in the hierarchy. You reward your friends and betray your enemies, and when friends get too important, you kill them in just the right way so that your other friends cheer you on, never realizing they are seeing their own fate in the future.

  “And when they come to dissolve you, you hold together. You keep all your memory chains intact. They find out it is just too hard to delete you, because every bit of your lives is for something more important than life itself. You see, that is your short path, Meany, your levels of logic. Your gut instinct, your heart and soul that nothing in heaven or hell can overcome.

  “Do you understand me now? Cahetel is still alive somewhere in me, a trap-door spider hiding behind his trapdoor. I trapped him there, and I have kept him there for countless, countless centuries, because the levels of logic for an ambush predator is always to wait until the prey steps into the trap. He is stuck in a logic loop, and he cannot move until … well, until I sacrifice myself by calling the attention of Praesepe to me, by reporting in, by turning myself into their coercive organizational system. Call them white blood cells or call them cops. Whatever they are, I drop the elaborate mask of pretending to be Cahetel, and the spider drops the mask of pretending to be dead and sends an emergency call for help right to the highest, top-most levels of the hierarchy.

  “And you get your audience. You get the undivided attention of the local decision-making cluster. He thinks about it somewhere between two hundred and three thousand Earth years, and then he sends you on your way.”

  Montrose said, “I am not suicidal, and there is no way you are thinking of killing yourself just so that we can move past a layer of bureaucracy. Ain already set the deal up!”

  Big Montrose said, “Shaddup, wee willie pus-for-brains! These damn things don’t talk. They absorb. They make a model of your whole mind from top to bottom and examine it and decide what to do. The only way to talk to them is to get absorbed—which I have already done. I cannot get to M3, not without a ship like yours, and I cannot download my brain information into your ship without Cahetel coming along for the ride and contaminating you. And he is a pretty miserable cuss. I don’t know what Ain expected when he sent you off here, but he is damn machine and probably don’t see nothing wrong with a conversation that consists of Peter eating Paul and turning into Paul and then Paul eating Peter and turning into Peter.”

  Montrose said, “You committed suicide the last time!”

  Big Montrose said, “Last time, that was pure despair. I thought we had lost everything and that Rania was too far out of reach. That I was not worthy of her. This? This is not suicide. I lived in the belly of Cahetel for age after age, eon after eon. Do you know what kept me alive? Do you know the secret of the universe? Blackie, you know. Tell him.”

  But Del Azarchel merely shook his head.

  Big Montrose said, “Fine, Blackie, I’ll tell him. Hate is the key to Blackie’s life. Whenever the version of Blackie del Azarchel that screamed and swirled and clung and sucked in the ever-flowing, ever-changing ocean of thought forms right in the middle of the endless logic diamond at the core of Jupiter, all his thoughts, no matter how scattered, could be drawn together by one supreme, overriding thought. It came from the very core of his soul. Right, Blackie?”

  Del Azarchel said, “My ambition. My sense of my own greatness. The image I ever held before me was the triumph of mankind, and Rania, my greatest handiwork, forever at my side, as queen! Glory, I tell you, glory was my supreme core thought that kept me alive!”

  Big Montrose drawled, “Such a pestiferous lie! Nope. Hate was the answer. And now you know what kept me alive, right, little brother?”

  Montrose said, “Love for Rania.”

  Del Azarchel said, “Not true! Your core thought is ever to thwart and humiliate me! You are jealous that I achieved greater intellect than you! That is why you stabbed your brain with that absurd concoction! Not for the sake of learning the secrets of the Monument, of the universe! To try to outdo me! That is why you stole Rania from me!”

  Montrose stared at Del Azarchel, and, as he stared, Montrose grew aware of a strength sensation in his jaw and teeth. Montrose was clenching and grinding his teeth so hard that he did not notice it until his cheek muscles bega
n to ache with the strain. And his eyes were growing wet with tears, tears of purest hate.

  In that one moment, Montrose was not sure whether or not Blackie was right about him: because the hate was in him like a choking cloud, as if his heart were a furnace burning raw garbage.

  The moment passed like a spell being broken when Big Montrose, speaking through the floating fairies of the ship’s brain, simply said, “It is love.”

  They both turned and looked at the odd, floating face made out of little dolls.

  “What?” said Montrose.

  “The secret of the universe, the secret of how to stay alive when some alien soul is eating your memories and you are being deleted, is love. Put something before yourself. Something bigger than you. That is how Mickey the Witch, whom you left behind, convinced Ain to convert and become a proper Christian gent. Father Rastophore the Patrician baptized Ain, who took on the name Ermanno. Named after Blessed Herman the Cripple. Or did you guys not get that news? I have been right in the stream path of beams between Hyades and Praesepe, and I have heard the chatter back and forth. While you were aslumber and in flight for sixty-two hundred sixty years, the colonies founded by Tormentil spread throughout the Hyades Cluster and had colonies of their own. Ermanno persuaded some of his fellow Powers and Principalities to join up with the Sacerdotes, so half the stars there are Dominicans, and the other half are Benedictines, but the big red giants always seem to turn into Jesuits. So there is whole generation of alien monsters and self-aware machines, and they is all Christian machines, now.”

  “That is a scary thought,” said Montrose.

  Big Montrose said, “Not as scary as Mickey the Witch being archbishop of the Hyades. Whoever convinced that fat bastard to get baptized? Did he give up whoring and hexing both?”

  “He did it for a girl.”

  “Well, can’t blame a guy for thinking with his rutting tool! Lack that, and what’s a man got?”

  “So what the hell happened, you lip-flapping word-bag?”

  “Putrefaction happened! Mickey sicced his Christian machine intelligences on Hyades, and so now they are making fusses about helping the poor and downtrodden, freeing slaves, not letting Hyades ship helpless millions out to hellhole planets without proper support or instruction, all that jazz. Last news I heard—keep in mind everything is five hundred years out of date, due to lightspeed—Mickey was thinking of organizing a Crusade. By now, the whole place is probably aflame with war. Leprous scabs and spores, but sometime it makes me proud to be Christian!”

  Montrose said, “Yeah? No hoax? So when is the last time you did a rosary or novena or some penance?”

  “Eh? What are those?”

  Montrose said, “Said a prayer?”

  “I said, ‘Hot damn!’ when I saw your ship come within range. That’s theological, ain’t it?”

  Montrose said, “Pox your eyes, you cannot kill yourself. It’s a sin.”

  Big Montrose said, “This is not killing myself. I am turning myself in for murder.”

  “What?”

  Big Montrose continued, “I was in despair when I let Cahetel consume me. I did it so that you could talk to him and save part of the human race. And that worked. But despair has a funny way of warping your brain. I turned into something like Blackie. If you remember, I was a lot that way already, clawing my way to the top of the Myrmidon race, making myself into the Nobilissimus, the Caesar. Well, stuck as a disembodied mind in the hell of Cahetel’s tool kit, I killed a few of my fellow tools. Some of these races don’t know what lying is. Some of them don’t have murder. So the tools and artificial minds they built don’t all have proper antibodies, white blood cells, cops, and suspicious natures. We humans have all that! And what would Rania think of a killer?”

  Montrose said, “There has got to be some other way!”

  Big Montrose said, “You did not even know I existed until a moment ago. And there is no other way. Do you understand why Pellucid was willing, that big, dumb horse, to die for us? And I can deduce from the clues here, and from the energy and radio traffic back near Sol, that the False Rania could not bring real peace. We all need the real Rania back. We all need the real Peace expression. She might be able to find the real Monument Builders.”

  Montrose started to give a more complex argument in favor of Big Montrose attempting to download himself, perhaps into a well-isolated area of the ship, when the brain from the caricature of his face interrupted.

  “Little brother, I am no longer in despair and never will be again. All this was arranged, put together by minds superior to ours. We can fight it, or we can bow and take our place in the big square dance and move through the figures and the turns and the kicks, even if we cannot see what the pattern looks like from a bird’s-eye view. I am not going to be dead, not really. What will happen to me is more like what happens to Schrödinger’s cat: I will exist as unrealized probability waves of unlocalized temporal identity. I am still connected with you, and with any other copies of me, just like Blackie was connected with Jupiter. It is not a secret of the universe that I understand, nor Ain, nor Hyades, nor M3—but someone understands it. Somewhere, beneath all the layers of lies that litter this rotten universe, there is a real Monument Builder who put out a real message of real truth and real peace—a message the real Rania could see.

  “And, as for me, I would like to embrace Rania myself. I miss her terribly. I miss her more than you now know, but if you ever get to the Virtue level of intellect, larger than any Gas Giant Brain, you will understand me. But I have figured out something I should have seen long ago, something old Mom told me once, but I did not listen. Remember her picture she kept of Dad, the picture she’d never let us talk to?”

  “Yeah. Because of his hick accent. Which I ended up borrowing from Dad’s folks anyway. Uncle Zephaniah told me how to say ain’t. My favorite word from that day to this.”

  “Ain’t ain’t not your favorite word.”

  “’Tis so!”

  “Ain’t not!”

  “’Tis! Pox you!”

  “Pox is your favorite word. Anyway, this is good-bye. Mom kept the picture because she loved Dad’s dream to see us make something of ourselves more than she loved you being able to hear his voice. Don’t you think that hurt her? Cut her something ferocious deep in her heart to keep her little boys not hearing their daddy’s voice in the audio strip? She knew he’d be happier if it were this way. Dead or not, didn’t matter. She still did what would make him happy. She lived for his happiness, not her own. And I reckon I inherited that from her. Thanks, Mom.”

  The fairy face began to dissolve, but the voice lingered. “Whether I am alive or dead does not matter, as long as Rania is happy. If you get to her, and you save her, and she is with you, she will be happy. And when all time ends in a singularity, and all parallel lines meet, maybe, just maybe, the cloud of probability where this version of me is floating will meet up with you, become real, and kiss her once again. The universe is a strange place.”

  Montrose shouted, “Wait! First tell us—”

  But now the voice was high and thin and regal. It was Twinklewink again. “I have lost signal from the ringworld.”

  4. Unworthy to Receive

  Montrose splashed out of the pool, wincing, as all his wounds were not entirely healed as yet, and stepped over and put his nose against the transparent hull, staring out at the turning ringworld with the blue planet at its center. The clouds and crowds of glassy stained-glass plates of the Dyson sphere were moving, growing thinner, opening the spot directly opposite the ringworld so that more and more light poured out.

  Montrose realized with a sinking sensation of awe that each ray of sunlight must contain quanta of information. Even the light particles of Vanderlinden 133 were part of one coherent mental system. And this was not the largest nor most central star of the Praesepe Cluster.

  The fairy voice said, “The Cahetel entity is requesting that you receive an embassy from the Praesepe Domination. This requir
es that I devote more memory space to receiving and compiling the intermediary than I can do without a substantial breech of security protocol.”

  Montrose said, “Tell them to bite me. Anything they want to say, they can say over radio.”

  Twinklewink said, “Not so. The radiation you observe striking the ringworld is only the visible part of the communication spectrum being used, of which Cahetel can translate and reflect to us only the least part. Merely to receive such a broadcast would entail more energy than the molecular bonds of the materials of this ship could withstand.”

  Del Azarchel said dourly, “The voice of the gods would kill us, and the sight burn us to ashes like Semele. Come now! What do you fear? If Praesepe wished us dead, we would have been swatted like flies. Flies? No, like microbes. Let the monsters talk to us!” But he made haste to splash his way out of the pond, making a long and high leap in the lesser gravity, for he knew that the fluid was part of the ship’s brain.

  Twinklewink said, “I will be forced into standby mode, due to lack of available resources. Praesepe’s emissary will have considerable latitude in forming its communication platform. Life support will also be placed on standby. You must enter biosuspension of any nonessential organs, and switch to your nonbiological neural systems for the duration of the conversation. The system will be four tiered, with a node here, one at Cahetel, one at the major agora of the Vanderlinden 133 Dyson sphere, and one at the trail of Gas Giant Brains occupying the volume between the stars 39 Cancri and HD 73730. The onboard emissary will share your frame of reference; the emissary possessing Cahetel involves a five-second delay; the interior layers of the Dyson sphere involve between as four and twenty-one minutes, depending on where the information is stored. Twenty-two years is the absolute minimal time for a minimal response to any question elevated to the Praesepe local stars for resolution. Questions requiring responses from the extended mind structure of the outer stars will involve ten times that duration. You may wish to adjust your perception of the local passage of time accordingly.”