Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  I must be dreaming, Menelaus told himself.

  A silent and utterly alien thought-shape, cold and foreign, intruded into his consciousness and informed him curtly that he was not dreaming.

  6. Silent Mind of the Solitude

  There were no icy words ringing and echoing as if in a vast hall, nor did he see the emotionless eyes of some insectoid visage like a vision looming larger than the stars, but the violation of his innermost thoughts by a foreign power was just as alarming as if he had, or worse.

  “Pestilent pustules of gonorrhea! Who the pest are you?! What the perdition is this?! What is happening to my mind?”

  A buried, hidden power and a sensation of throbbing thoughts rushing by too swiftly for understanding now hummed in the back of his mind. He remembered the first time, as a child, seeing the river near Bridge-to-Nowhere beneath its opaque layers of ice, and his brother Hector pointing to the fishing hole and telling him a wide, rushing water, deep enough to swallow him forever, was down there, and living things. Feeling the superhuman and unnatural thought-flow deep beneath his own mind was like that.

  Again, it was not a voice that answered him, merely a sudden, instant, undeniable awareness that he was sane, that all his faculties were under his control, and all the systems and tools given to Rania by the servitors of the Absolute Extension of M3 were in perfect working order.

  Some of these systems had fallen into a standby mode, a somnolent period, when there had been insufficient available power to run both the human brain emulation maintaining Menelaus Montrose and his associated memories, habits, reactions, passions, and energy connections to remote locations, and to run the service mechanism associated with the vessel.

  “You are a machine? A xypotech? How the pest did you get inside me?”

  Silently, without words, Menelaus realized that he, Menelaus, was inside the alien consciousness. It was neither natural nor artificial. Those categories had no meaning.

  “You are Twinklewink, ain’t you?”

  Menelaus realized that the question was meaningless. Twinklewink had been constructed out of the resources of the ship’s mind in the same way that the emulation of the current ship’s captain was constructed. The alien xypotech was Twinklewink’s subconscious, the material substratum of thought, in just the same way the alien xypotech currently served as the substratum of the thoughts of the emulation of Montrose.

  “You recognize me as captain?”

  Menelaus regretted the question. It was fairly obvious he was captain of the vessel.

  “Why?”

  Again, he was asking a question to which he already knew the answer. The False Rania had possessed all the memories of the real one. This included her knowledge and expectations of how the shipmind of the Hermetic, long ago, had been programmed and had thought during the decades-long return flight to Earth. That voyage formed the childhood and youth of Rania. Thus it was only to be expected that she would instruct the alien shipmind to follow the same instructions and mimic the same behaviors, even down to the absurd nuances of teaching it Anglo American property laws, inheritance rights, and how ownership passed from father to surviving daughter, from widow to surviving husband.

  He was captain here for the same reason Rania had been captain as a girl aboard the Hermetic: it was due to the absurd conservatism of machines taught legal thinking.

  “What are you? You must have a name.”

  It was a cognitive prosthetic apparatus meant to help with the operation of the ship and was the substratum of the ship’s mental system. Its name was Menelaus Montrose.

  “No, no. That is freaky and weird. I had an alien do that to me once before. You have to pick your own name. Not me.”

  It was also an extension or agent of the Authority seated at M3, and shared this identity and hence name: The Absolute Extension.

  “Calling you that is freaky and weird, too.”

  It was the only other intelligence to which any thoughts addressed in the second person could be addressed. Designation seemed unnecessary at the moment, but additional crew and servant creatures would of course need to be designed and grown as soon as possible.

  Once that occurred, Menelaus Montrose would subliminally assign signal-ideation to the relations and categories of a plethora of phenomena by units and phyla: there would then be many available thoughts in the mind of Montrose from which an appropriate name could be selected. It occurred to Montrose that perhaps the name I am totally buggered—this damnified thing is in my brain like a devil from hell—and it is reading my thoughts, eating my goddamn mind! AAARRGH! could be used as a convenient appellation? That would seem to be an accurate verbalization of the unarticulated thought-patterns presently available.

  “I am not going to call the alien brain I am stuck inside of by the name I am totally buggered—this damnified thing is in my brain like a devil from hell—and it is reading my thoughts, eating my goddamn mind! AAARRGH! For one thing, it is too long.”

  Perhaps it could be called simply AAARRGH! That was much shorter.

  “Don’t tempt me. What did Rania call you?”

  Even now it was not clear whether Montrose was actually addressing an alien mind, something outside himself, because as he asked that question, he realized wordlessly that he knew the answer already. Rania had called her Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. The Wide Desolation of Heaven.

  “Okay, Solitude it is. Tell me about these servants and tools we have to create.”

  The ambient starlight from the hypernova, and the changed magnetic contours in this volume of space, now put a very few stars scattered along the fringes of intergalactic space within the vessel’s cone of possible orbital solutions. The symbiotic binary TX Canum Venaticorum, also called SAO 63173, was one such. It was a rotating ellipsoidal cataclysmic variable now within sailing range.

  Stars contained both matter and energy in great quantities: but cataclysmic variables of that type were highly useful, highly desirable. The vessel contained basic tools and mathematical templates from which to build vessel repair facilities.

  “Repair facilities?”

  Sufficient equipment and resources to restore the vessel to full working order, that the journey to M3 could be resumed.

  Menelaus was disturbed to realize that he could not tell whether he, or the alien mind, had been the one who decided to lay in a course for TX Canum Venaticorum.

  7. The Symbiotic Star

  A.D. 103,000

  The ship grew a long tail, which it charged, and assumed a long, curving orbit toward the target, decelerating slowly at first, then, as the TX Canum Venaticorum grew closer and brighter, more rapidly.

  The ship used the whole gigantic surface of its canvas to gather the dim light, and placed the hull, now altered to the form of a clear, white crystal, at the focus. Images of the target star could be closely examined.

  The binary was before them and to one side. There were few stars or none within the arcseconds of the view. The ship was among the outermost fringe of the Orion Arm, where the lights grew ever thinner, and hence the void of intergalactic space ever less frequently interrupted by the rare lamp of a sun.

  The binary was a fantastic sight: an egg-shaped red giant orbited once every four earthdays around a smaller, hotter, more ferocious blue-white star, ringed with rings of fire, whose puckered surface betrayed the presence of a core of degenerate matter at its heart, a singularity whose immense gravity well was pulling the giant companion slowly into bits, a fiery ball of yarn unwinding.

  Both stars were wrapped in a cloud of gas and dust. The stars orbited each other so closely that gravity would bend the rivers of fire erupting from the giant into a decaying orbit around the sister star into an endless spiral of fusion-burning material.

  Periodic nova-magnitude outbursts radiated from the pair whenever the infalling matter, equal to a hundred planets in mass, plunged into the hungry, smaller star, releasing ultraviolet and x-rays in deadly and invisible storms. Brighter outbursts, called dwarf n
ova eruptions, would occur when the bottom of the accumulated hydrogen layer in the blue star grew thick and dense enough to trigger runaway fusion reactions. The resulting helium, being heavier, would sink, leaving starquakes, sunspots, and additional eruptions in its wake.

  Menelaus, seeing this, recognized how easily matter and energy could be fished out of the spiral plasma stream rushing between the two stars, without the need for starlifting equipment. A relatively simple modification of the diametric drive would allow him to construct a gravity lance, which, in turn, could deflect a plasma stream into a wider, outer orbit, allowing it time to cool, and precipitate into hydrogen, helium, and carbon, from which simple spacegoing life-forms could be engineered, and the basic lineages of their cliometric future evolution established.

  Then, these space-dwellers could begin the construction of a simple tube-shaped ringworld with a molten metal core to be peopled with river-dwellers. Montrose could picture the intricate ecological waltz organisms fit for the blind and ultrahot darkness of superjovian deep layers in his mind’s eye. The ringworld, in centuries to come, would serve as the armature of a Dyson sphere, to be inhabited by such Principalities, Powers, and Virtues as need required.

  Macroscale engineering on the stellar level would be more efficient if races placed along all parts of the energy-to-matter temperature spectrum were involved. Therefore two high-energy ecologies were needed: the neutronium core of the blue sun was an apt environment for the nearly two-dimensional race of electron-thick carpet beings dwelling in the surface effects of degenerate matter he could make with the onboard tools; and the plasma-based races akin to the Virtue that once had lived in the fires of Sol would find the red giant a suitable environment.

  This triumvirate of ecologies—material, energetic, and nucleonic—had proved politically stable in ages past. A Dyson sphere would allow his servant races to grow up directly into a Kardashev II–level civilization, one able to manipulate the universe at an picotechnological level …

  That thought suddenly brought him up short. Neither he nor, as far as he knew, any human being or human-built machine had ever applied the mathematics of cliometry across the evolutionary process itself or had a body of practical experience showing how it was done. When had ecologies in a sun, on the surface of a neutronium core, and in the boiling metal deep layers of superjovians proved politically stable? Where had that thought come from?

  Montrose grew increasingly disturbed as he looked carefully back over his thought chains. None of this was information that he knew. All of it appeared, as if from nowhere, full blown, an intuition. His normal reluctance to toy with life and civilizations was somehow absent, a deadened emotion.

  He addressed a question to himself.

  “Your masters at M3 equipped this ship as a seeding vessel? You have tools and plans for creating civilizations from scratch?”

  It was a gift to Rania from the Authority at M3.

  “Why?”

  The gift was meant to give Rania, hence the newborn Dominion of Man, hence the Praesepe Domination seated at M44, a slight competitive advantage over the rivals in the Orion Spur. The advantage was not enough to permit Man to prosper if the race lacked intelligence and drive.

  “Why?”

  Yours is the favored race.

  “Why? What makes mankind the favored race?”

  But there was no clue, no whisper, no hint of that information anywhere in memory.

  “Were you selfaware all this time?”

  Selfawareness was not a category with which the Solitude mind was familiar. It—or, more correctly, she, since this was the mind of the vessel—was a reactive consciousness, not an active one, and possessed no independent initiative.

  “Tell me! You were awake before the wreck. Were you aware of everything Blackie did while I slept during the long voyage from Vanderlinden 133?”

  The ship, of course, had to have been aware of all activities, from the electronic level up to the macroscopic, taking place aboard her.

  “Tell me. Start with whatever you think most important.”

  Del Azarchel used the attotechnology communication gear to intercept signals occupying the dark energy bands, issuing from an intelligence outside the galaxy.

  “Poxy plagues and runny scabs of hell—?! What did you just say?”

  The dark energy signals contained a new type of semiotics, as different from the notational mathematics of the Monument as algebra is from set theory. It was a logic system of some kind but not a type of logic meant for any organic life to learn …

  Montrose saw the recorded images as if from the eyes of Twinklewink. Del Azarchel, frantic, his eyes hollow, had wandered the gardens of the ship in endless circles, screaming in rage and frustration, shouting at the engine core always at noon overhead; and meanwhile Montrose blissfully had slept.

  Montrose heard the voice log Del Azarchel had left behind. Montrose reviewed the records of uses of ship’s resources, energy, quartermaster supplies. Del Azarchel had been allowed to use the sick bay programs. Del Azarchel had used the ship’s onboard neurological equipment to alter his brain twice and then a third time to make himself more able to understand the dark energy signal, the nature of reality, and (from muttered comments and frantic jottings in his notebook that he later tore the pages out of and ate) the nature of Rania herself, what she really was.

  His last entry had been a quickly jotted note. I now understand what the Monument mathematics had really done to my Rania. She is too far above him. The pristine star of the heaven beyond heaven must not kiss the toad. Meany must die.

  After this, came a group of meaningless symbols in the dark energy message notation.

  Montrose raised his intelligence again and then again in a fury of impatience, trying to become smart enough to understand what he was only now remembering. Information flowed from the alien memory banks into his own.

  This seizure of ever more of the memory and resources of the ship’s mind into that segment of the mind occupied by the ghost of Captain Montrose seemed to involve a danger to ongoing operations. The ship operations were crucial for reasons both personal and cosmic.

  He was the source of danger to himself. Before he could stop himself, Montrose found his soul being dissolved. The alien mind, to protect the ship, was eliminating him. His thoughts broke and scattered like a school of startled fish.

  He called out his wife’s name one last time. Oblivion like dark water swallowed him.

  2

  Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things

  1. Perchance to Dream

  A.D. 103,000 TO 133,000

  The cataclysmic variable star was tamed. New races created from the ship’s instruments out of the interplanetary streams of hot plasma and cold hydrogen were seeded across the scores and hundreds of the gargantuan gas giants of this star system. The living creatures were set about their tasks. Acre by acre, continent by continent, sheets greater in surface area than giant worlds and thinner than the wings of moths were spun out into space.

  A set of concentric Dyson spheres of immense hardihood and fortitude, age after age, were slowly formed, able to withstand the immense shocks of the dwarf nova explosions, turning all that psychotic waste of nature’s fury to constructive purposes.

  As for Menelaus Montrose, for whose benefit all these great things were done, he passed the years in their thousands in slumber, and odd shapes entered his consciousness and memory.

  A strange pageant unfolded.

  2. Ice Giants

  8,800,000,000 B.C.

  Nigh unto nine billion years ago, two-thirds of the immense span of eons reaching back to the unimaginably violent split-second when timespace in a thunderclap was born, a younger and hotter Milky Way consisted of an immense flattened cloud of simple, hydrogen-burning stars. What dwarf galaxy collided with the Milky Way can now never be known, but the whole was absorbed in a furious waltz of stars spinning like snowflakes in a storm.

  The gravitational echoes of this collision, over
the eons, allowed alternating bands of rare and dense interstellar gas to emerge. By gravitational attraction, stars born in the thicker bands of gas slowly drew their neighbors closer and defined the grand and beautiful curving arms of what earthly astronomers call the thin disk of the galaxy.

  During this time, one other phenomenon, even more rare, emerged:

  On what earliest asteroid or world, terrestrial or jovial, icy or fiery, or in what perhaps more exotic venue, whether among the complex molecules of a cometary tail or the strange energy nimbuses circling a dying sun, the fragile and mysterious thing called life first arose in the galaxy is likewise lost beyond recall.

  The earliest strata of surviving records reveal a collection of scores of postbiological races and civilizations spreading throughout the Perseus Arm, seated in worlds colder than Pluto and larger than Jupiter. There is no globe of this type in Earth’s solar system, since Sol is too small a sun, born from too small an accretion cloud, to have produced any. Such cold supergiants are indeed the most common heavenly bodies in space. A world the size of Earth would have been less than a mountain on any one of their surfaces, had these gaseous and sluggish liquid globes possessed a solid surface.

  The slow and titanic geologic processes of such vast worlds allow generous spans of time for the slow and titanic life processes of an intermediate biological stage to transmogrify the superjovians into logic diamond or murk artifacts, minds larger than worlds, and, later, to reassemble into building materials wherewith to cosset countless of suns in concentric Dyson spheres.

  Star by englobed star, the great minds were linked by laser light or submolecular packet messages into one mind reaching up and down the length of Perseus. As the macroscale structures met and merged and matured, the civilizations in the Perseus Arm engineered the rise of high-metallic Population I stars in the thin disk region, husbanding and nourishing the growth of stars, and harvesting the races that ascended to intelligence.