Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  “I hate my kids. You are bastards, you know that? Because you are my kids and not hers. If Rania had been here, all this disrespect would not have happened. Damn! This is why brats need two parents. Raise a guy with one parent and look at what happens!”

  “Are you talking about yourself or about Blackie? He is the devil in our mythology.”

  “Good for him, but he is just a man, no better than me.”

  “Just my butt pimple. You, and Blackie, and even Rania, you introduce unexpected and chaotic vectors into history. Haven’t you noticed that Powers and Principalities and superbeings hundreds or thousands of times more intelligent than you cannot control you? That even godlike beings end up dancing to your tune, not you to theirs? You three are strange attractors in the field of history, singularities where all normal predictive models break down.”

  “No mystery. The only reason why Blackie and me kept driving Jupiter and bigger brains crazy was because of something hidden in the Monument patterns he and I and Rania had reflected in our nervous systems. You saying it goes deeper than that?”

  “I am saying someone, somewhere, is helping you. Remember that hypernova that just so happened to go off thirty thousand years ago? It just so happened to give you enough energy to get here. This star system just so happens to be perfectly situated with all the raw materials in all the right proportions needed to refit and refuel a superstarship which even the Hosts and Principalities of the Orion Arm could not repair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a fairy godmother, Old Man, a guardian angel. You, or all of us. Maybe the whole human race is being watched and helped. The Dominion of Praesepe deduced it and was afraid. That is the only reason those cold bastards helped you on your way. Someone has been pulling your puppet string for a long time. You are just a pawn in someone’s paw.”

  “Whose?”

  “That is why we showed you the dream, all those eons of history. It is got to be someone smart as all get-out: a selfaware thinking system with an intelligence north of a quintillion or so. How come you didn’t see this a long time ago? You thought it was just good luck, or your inborn talent? You have a mighty high opinion of yourself, Old Man. Someone was helping you.”

  Montrose answered with a technically illegal, theologically unsound, and biologically unlikely statement in the imperative.

  There was a silent flash like summer lightning. The angelic shape made of fire and swimming in the weightless plasma far above was signaling.

  5. The Long Answer

  Montrose found full knowledge of this heliographic language in his brain, fully integrated as if by long habit. He could read it.

  “Sir, our master is a bit too curt,” flashed Eliwlod from his spread wings. “I will explain. Our right to keep you in suspended animation derives from our filial piety and regard for your welfare. You are suicidal and violent. You killed yourself.”

  Montrose uttered another blasphemy. The transparent substance of the throne behind him emitted flares and fulgurations, translating his word.

  Eliwlod spoke in flashes like lightning. “You existed for two centuries inside the onboard shipbrain of the Solitude, inside the mind of a creature we call the Lithotroph. You yourself directed the creation and placement of the first matter-condensation factories in stellar orbit. From asteroids and debris, you created tools, then intelligent tools, then self-perpetuating intelligent tools; then simple races, then complex, and the first simple ecologies for solar life, neutronium life, and asteroid-based life. Salamanders, flats, threads. The first were based on models taken from the Magisterium of Scutum-Crux Arm; the second were based on the models taken from the Instrumentality races of the Core; the third from the Circumincession of Sagittarius Arm.

  “In order that these three root races would eventually evolve into the single cohesive folk you see before you, it was necessary to use the ecological cliometry to produce a combination vector, which only the Solitude shipmind could use with authority and verve.

  “However, you could not resist the mental influences, the passions and habits, and even the philosophical categories and psychological protocols, of the Lithotrophic mind of the Solitude.”

  Montrose sat down slowly onto the glass throne. His face was impassive, but then again, he always wore an impassive look when someone booted him hard in the gut with a lot of muscle behind the blow.

  The words of light continued. “When a day came that you had lost all biological memories and habits, all sexual drive, romance, love, and human feeling, you realized you were unworthy of Rania and hence unworthy of life.

  “You tried to re-form a previous version of yourself from records, one who loved her. But you objected. You formed two iterations, and you fought yourself viciously.

  “The battle spread to your children, tools, and minions. The Cataclysmic star system was torn by civil war at a time when the first two ringworlds of the main Dyson armature were not yet complete, and the dismantling of the Gas Giants had not yet been fully automated. Both sides agreed to settle the matter in a limited fashion, by dueling, since neither side dared bring harm to the great work to which all their lives have been devoted, and all their children’s lives would be. The version of you who forgot his love, a creature more lithotroph than human, failed to pull the trigger, but died on the field of honor. Some say he turned his gun on himself before you shot him.”

  Montrose put his face in his hands. He shot himself in a duel for love of Rania. He remembered having done something like this before.

  Eliwlod continued, “The worst was next. Even though you no longer understood love and self-sacrifice, your sheer stubbornness and loyalty to her forced you to commit radical brain surgery on yourself. You erased your own memory back to the first point before the alien mind contamination was planted, and carefully removed every subconscious thought vector, passion, habit, and neural architectural feature which might have reinitiated the alien brain contamination. You, the only remaining version there is, remember nothing after your first clash with the Lithotroph whose brain hosted yours.”

  He looked up. “No wonder you think I am suicidal and crazy. But I just want my wife. Is that so bad? Is that really so bad?”

  “As the Judge of Ages of the Cataclysm system—ergo, as the officer in charge of keeping our history on track until such time as this project was complete—this one project which is the spine of all history and the source of all the meaning in our lives, I can answer definitively: yes, it is bad.”

  Montrose looked up, snarling, “As if I give a damn about your opinion, junior!”

  “She will not love you if you sacrifice everything for her. You must love what she loves. We have deduced this over the centuries.”

  “What does she love?”

  “If you do not know that, automatically, unthinkingly, instinctively, you are doomed, and she will cling to Del Azarchel. He understands her.”

  “Damn you!”

  “Our society is peaceful. We are all grown from you, your mind, your psychology, and therefore, we all love her. We know her as well as you. We know. We have had countless thousands of years to deduce these conclusions.”

  “Deduce it how?”

  The flashing words answered, “That is for another to say.”

  6. The Dark Energy Broadcast

  Because he was looking up, he did not see the first part of what the Melusine beneath the floor said when she spoke up.

  Her language was a subtle and swift alteration of the colors in her lucent skin. The bioluminescent photophores in her outer and transparent skin layers twinkled, blushed, danced in silent sign language, and her human face showed the normal range of expressions as she spoke.

  “Honored ancestor and father of our race, please be aware: We have had many ages to study the attotechnology disk in the core of the ship drive and to use the method established by Del Azarchel to send out ghosts of emissaries to various likely locations within a thousand-lightyear radius of this position. We hav
e made diplomatic contact with the Powers and Principalities, Virtues and Hosts scattered throughout the Orion Arm and learned that three great colonial polities of man, the Benedictine Empyrean, the Jesuit Empyrean, and the Dominican, are expanding like bubbles from centers long ago established by Melechemoshemyazanagual the Witch. We also plumbed the memories and archives the Lithotroph carried. From all these, we were able to reconstruct that greater history of the Milky Way Galaxy which we imparted to you.”

  A light now shined behind Montrose. He turned. The brownish-gray mass of the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum hung at the motionless axis point of the turning glass cylinder in which Montrose stood. The thousands of miles of sails were folded, lashed to thin spars which had not been part of the ship before he slept. Part of the hull substance was transparent; at the center point of the ship was a hollow sphere, and in the midpoint of this, a black ceramic ball held in an armature. This one was metal, curved like the seam of a baseball, not wood, for the rootless and crownless tree Rania had designed to hold the black engine sphere had died thirty millennia ago. From the reddish aberration of the light glancing from the sphere, Montrose deduced that the artificial neutronium disk was spinning at relativistic speeds, warping space and lengthening the wavelengths escaping the microscopic singularity.

  Again, he yanked his eyes down and behind him. Underneath the glass floor, the seagoing Melusine continued her remarks, “—a partial reconstruction of the semiotic system Del Azarchel found in the dark energy broadcasts he intercepted from beyond the galaxy. In the ontic semiotic system, one equals one, and the law of identity applies. But there are nonontic, hence intransitive, semiotic systems, subsemiotic or supersemiotic, where one equals a faction or a multitude, each with a corresponding nonbinary logic system, non-Euclidean geometry, non-Dedekind mathematics.”

  Montrose said, “Wait! I missed something. What the pox are you talking about?”

  Blanchefleur signaled, “The reason why all the races of Cataclysm are ferociously devoted to the reunion of you and Rania is because of these discoveries. You and she are not merely agents of turmoil and attractor basins for chaotic cliometric vectors; a higher order of being, operating through the Monument, altered you, and her, and perhaps the other Hermeticists as well, of which Del Azarchel presumably is the sole survivor.”

  “Altered how? To do what?”

  “Rania is more than she seems, but what she is, I cannot know. Ain told you, long ago, of energy entanglements connecting you and Rania.”

  “Hold on—how do you know that?”

  “Every child in our many civilizations and societies for the last thirty thousand years went through the many volumes of your memory as our sole source of precreation history.”

  “That’s just freakish and wrong,” Montrose muttered.

  “Ain said these entanglements were a primary noumenal reality, more fundamental than any phenomenon propagated through time and space. These were what Ximen del Azarchel, before he scuttled the ship, investigated while you slept, and how it is that he and he alone discovered the broadcast point of the exogalactic dark energy. He traced one of his own noumenal energy entanglements to the spot, using the ship’s instruments.”

  “Wait—what? He traced his love-waves to find his own true love?”

  “It is not love-waves. It is a prearranged noumenal harmony, entering timespace from right angles to the normal lightcone of the Hubble expansion.”

  “Sounds like mumbo jumbo to me, not physics.”

  “He traced the wavepath of his preestablished fate to find fate. Your fate is love. His is death.”

  “You can talk gobbledygook about fate and love and death if you like, but I sure as plague don’t buy that you are talking about physics.”

  “Then you will encounter the pleasure of learning a new and richer paradigm of the universe! A truly primal and universal theorem must account for all reality, not just local and physical conditions.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You are surely aware that some information can propagate faster than the speed of light in a vacuum?”

  “Sure. There are certain tricks you can do with a superdense substance and get light to propagate at higher speeds.”

  “That is not what I meant. To an observer standing outside a singularity, a black hole, what is known of the interior conditions?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Untrue. The mass is known, because otherwise outside objects could not be attracted toward the event horizon. Second, if the black hole is rotating, the frame-dragging effect is detectable to outside observers, who can calculate spin rate and orientation. Third, the electrical charge is known, as the greater charge shrinks the radius of the horizon. Any intelligence within the event horizon but outside the internal Cauchy horizon could manipulate these three variables to send a coherent signal out of the event horizon, apparently violating the local conservation of information. However, a simple tensor equation suffices to show that if the closed spacelike geodesic is converted to a closed timelike geodesic, then the conservation is maintained for all observers—but this would be information not propagated through spacetime. It would seem simultaneous to all observers, unlocalized to any point in time: a background radiation.”

  Montrose said, “Blackie thought the mystic energy link binding me to Rania was that?”

  “Not mystic, but yes. Imagine the lightcone of the universe shaped like a bell. No information can pass out. But any information affecting the mass, spin value, and charge of the universe as a whole would set the whole bell ringing. The information would be nonlocalized, apparently coming from all points in space at once, occupying no particular point in time.”

  Montrose shook his head. “Nothing has that physical property.”

  She said, “We are talking of something more fundamental than physics: the properties of the nonphysical matrix or context in which physical properties are allowed to exist. What establishes the curvature of spacetime? What establishes the rules of mathematics and semiotics? Our investigation of these metaphenomena show that you and Rania and perhaps Blackie have energy entanglements leading to points outside the lightcone of the universe. It is for this reason that your influence on the surrounding events within normal timespace is disproportionate. Only a First Order–magnitude being, as a selfaware galaxy acting as a whole, has the capacity to manipulate sufficiently large volumes of spacetime—our calculations suggest a volume larger than the local cluster of galaxies—to have bent your energy entanglements to ulterior points outside the universe. It was for this reason that we inscribed what we know of galactic history on your memory chains.”

  “What does this all mean? I don’t understand anything you are saying.”

  She said, “I am answering your question. You were kept imprisoned all these years because you are too dangerous to us and too important to the fate of all things. We are within our rights both for reasons of self-protection and for reasons of the accomplishment of the goal for which you created us. Your love for Rania is not meaningless, not parochial, and it touches far more than the local area of timespace.”

  Montrose pondered that in silence for a full minute, and then finally shook his head and laughed. “Ridiculous. I mean, all men in love feel that way. Why me?”

  “You are not the significant half of the dyad. The question is, why her? What is her true nature?”

  “She’s just a girl.”

  “She’s just a girl born from an alien symbolic coding system, translated into human genetics, hence human neural architecture, based on a mathematical model of reality; and this model was a redacted, edited, and marred version taken from some far older original version issuing from an unknown primordial race. She has somehow captured an echo of that true and unmarred original and commands some strange art or power, such that even M3 must release the human race from indenture at her bidding!

  “Listen!” she continued, her skin pulsing and flushed with intensity. “We were not able to reconstruct all of Del
Azarchel’s work, and so there are parts of the intransitive semiotics he learned from the dark energy which we cannot see. But the fragments we can reconstruct allow us to run cliometric models based on axioms far different from those embedded in the Monument. The intransitive semiotics, naturally, cannot be transposed back into words and thoughts of any Monument-based form of life, such as we are, and such as you, once you injected your brain with an experimental cocktail, made yourself to be. But they can be transposed back into nonlinguistic, presemiotic formats and placed within the nervous system of a volunteer. We have a mantis who has done so. He says your love, and the love of your wife, is more important than this galaxy and will be the source of blessing or cursing across all intergalactic space, something to preserve or destroy even the sidereal universe! More he could not say, having no symbol-system by which to express his intransitive and intuitive thought-forms.

  “We did not dare allow you to be awake, walking here and there, getting into fights, drinking and swearing and brooding. You must seek her without delay. If you change too far, turn yourself into something inhuman, you will fail her.”

  “You are out of your pox-ridden pestiferous mind, lady, if you think my affection for my bride will snuff out the stars or light them up again. That is just crazy talk.”

  The Melusine grew brighter. “You and she are tutelary deities to us, father and mother of our race, all our races. Love is everything. Love creates and sustains the cosmos, and will save it. All this, thirty thousand years of peaceful and unified civilization, was able to prosper without war because we lived for love. Your love.”

  Eliwlod spoke in the flares of lightning from above. “We have satisfied the obligation your creation of us has imposed. We built the launching laser you need and set up a social system easily able to outlast the thirty thousand years required to reach to M3 from here. We have repaired the ship, refueled her with the only source of diametric fuel in this arm of the galaxy, and reprogrammed the shipmind with its original safeguards, so that the Lithotroph is buried under a xypotech based once more on human psychological protocols. You are three thousand lights closer than Sol, so your voyage will be that much shorter.”