Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  Montrose said, “Not that I care, but what will all y’all do once I skedaddle?”

  Eliwlod muted the flares blazing from his wings. What emotion this gesture expressed, Montrose did not know. “When you take the attotechnology neutronium disk of the drive from us, our long-range contact with the nearby arms of the galaxy will be lost. That disk was the central treasure on which our civilization was based. Through it, we were able to discriminate fine gradations of pangalactic signals, and echoes from the far past, and learn the history we taught you. In a way, that tiny disk was the lynchpin of our civilization of three races for three thousand years. Nonetheless, we renounce our ownership of it.”

  From underfoot, Blanchefleur the Melusine shined with these words: “We now know Rania’s great secret of peace in all its simplicity. Our greater destiny, our true life, begins once you depart. This galaxy is severed, which once was one, just as you and she are severed. We shall recombine and reunite the galaxy itself. Love itself so ordains!”

  Pal spat out his cigar. “Now get lost.”

  7. The Great Sphere Scatters

  A.D. 133,000 TO A.D. 133,100

  At this word, through the glass disk of the habitat hull, Montrose saw the black latticework of the inner sphere develop cracks that ran quickly across the endless landscape and grew. Within the cracks were stars. The Dyson sphere was opening.

  The various plates and segments of the Dyson sphere nearest his point of view began to sink and separate. A shining silver substance, acres of sail material thin as gossamer and larger than worlds, stretched itself between the expanding lattices of the Dyson framework.

  Each segment of the landscape was of a slightly different size, and all the chains of cylinders, blue and green oceans and fields of greater surface area than all the worlds of the Empyrean Polity left so long ago so far behind, began to migrate to the focal point of the great parabolas each segment of Dyson wall slowly evolved into.

  Hours passed. The blue sun, blindingly bright, hove into view around the limb of the rose-red giant, connected to it by a curving spiral of flame. By that time, the equatorial regions and the other hemisphere of the Dyson, closer and then farther on the far side of the binary, began to show signs of breaking up. Perhaps it had all happened at once, at an agreed-upon time, but light still had hours to crawl from one side of the outer Dyson to the other.

  In those hours, Menelaus Montrose was taken aboard the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. The ship was launched with no fanfare at all, just as Menelaus preferred. The last man aboard, a young fellow wearing a yellow hat, simply kicked the airlock shut and let the docking clamps fall free. Then came other meetings, discussions, education sessions, and so on.

  Every secret the countless scientists and transcendentalists had discovered or intuited about the workings of the ship and its unique superhuman attotechnology was told to him or inserted into his memory chains.

  The error which caused the corruption of his mind the first time could not be repeated; the shipmind, when fully functioning and fully fueled, had resource enough to run proper safety protocols. So the destruction of all his memories, centuries and millennia of life here among the creatures he had fathered, was one more crime laid to the feet of Ximen del Azarchel.

  Over a hundred of the scientists and adventurers of the Cataclysm system accompanied him for the first several months of the voyage, to train him in the sciences they had learned and familiarize him with the workings of the ship.

  The fellow in the yellow Stetson (his name was Malagant Mathesis Southsphere-Montrose) explained how they had recovered the fuel. “Y’all assumed that when Praesepe reached into your fuel tanks and turned all the tritium into antimass versions of the same isotope, those tanks contained all you had in the ship.”

  Menelaus said, “Why would Praesepe make any more? Or put it anywhere else?”

  Malagant shrugged and grinned. “Who the hell knows? Most likely its a process Praesepe did by bombardment, or manipulation of the Plank dimensions. It just took every H-3 atom and rotated its mass to antimass. Somewhere within the Praesepe star cluster, at the same time, an equal mass of antimass particles was rotated back to normal matter. That is what it said, according the records in the shipmind.

  “Since y’all had nothing but pure tritium in the fuel tanks, you and Blackie thought that was all there was; but there are naturally occurring atoms of heavy hydrogen in every body of water, deuterium, and, more rare but still there, the radioactive isotope tritium. There was some in your blood. Some in the water recovered from the ship’s circular river, water system, wine cellar, other hydrogen compounds throughout. Over the years, one by one, very carefully, our ancestors found every single last atom of the negative-mass hydrogen and gathered them together. The lump of frozen hydrogen is in the middle of the drive core right now.

  “Some of us wanted to keep half, but—well, they came to a bad end. It is all there. It ain’t much, but over time, it will do. Once you are out of the range of the acceleration beam, you can continue to accelerate. Uh, slowly. And use it to decelerate at the far end. Also slowly. Assuming M3 does not do the right thing and catch you.”

  Behind, the binary had been stimulated to a regular series of nova-magnitude outbursts as material was force-fed from the greater to the lesser star. The vast waves of energy belled out the sailcloth of the nine hundred vessels. Each vessel was a segment arc of the shattered Dyson larger than if all the matter of the gas giant was rolled out into a two-dimensional surface and the payload were chains and yarn balls of habitats in their trillions and quadrillions.

  The smaller, inner Dyson also changed, becoming a set of polarized mirrors, and the light shining through it became coherent, energetic, vastly increased in light pressure. Rivers of laser light issued in every direction, shining on the immeasurably colossal sails of the mammoth masses of Dyson wall area, dozens of solar systems’ worth of populations under sail.

  Before ten years had passed, the crew and teachers bid him farewell, some kindheartedly, and some without regret, flying on small shuttles whose sails were like those of gossamer dragonflies across the light-months to the nearer vessels.

  He did not reconstruct flowers and trees and gardens as Rania had done, nor erect an endless ring-shaped river. Instead he created a simple barbell, with his Spartan living quarters at one side, little more than a cot and a coffeepot and a punching bag, and a medical chamber containing a coffin at the other, with the black ball of the engine core midmost. His exercise routine consisted of climbing up from one gee to zero gee, turning, and climbing down into the other bell, boxing, and target practice. The target was pasted on the floor of the far bell, a pace to the counterclockwise of a point directly overhead and directly opposite his cot. It was not the best form, but he would lie on his back and shoot practice rounds the length of the tumbling vessel. It helped to pass the time.

  Before a hundred years had passed, the diaspora had already reached some of the nearer stars, and surely all the alien eyes and instruments up and down the Orion Arm were studying the flares of nova light shining from TX Canum Venaticorum.

  But whatever the fate of those countless multitudes crossing scores and hundreds of lightyears to invade the Powers and Principalities of the Orion Arm, Montrose had no concern.

  By then he was traveling an infinitesimal fraction below lightspeed away from a galaxy that had turned heavy, red, and warped by Einstein behind him, faster than any signals carrying any news could reach.

  8. The Naked Singularity

  A.D. 133,100 TO A.D. 163,000

  When he woke between decades, centuries, and millennia of suspended animation, he turned his eyes and instruments backward toward the galactic core, which he saw from an angle no human eyes had seen, save those who had traveled this path before with Rania aboard Bellerophron.

  His beheld the jet of x-rays issuing at relativistic speeds from the core of the supermassive black hole eating the heart of the galaxy. This relativistic jet was something terre
strial science had long ago suspected, even if never before seen.

  But there was no event horizon, or, rather, the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way’s core was smaller than its own Cauchy horizon. There was something called the cosmic censorship hypothesis which held that the deterministic nature of physics could never be seen by an observer. This required the singularities inside black holes to always be invisible. No naked singularity, other than the Big Bang, could be permitted in the universe.

  Yet here Montrose stared in awe at what Rania had hinted she earlier had observed: for along the relativistic jet extending billions of lightyears into intergalactic space was an ultrafine filament, a gravitational distortion, apparently a form of Tipler cylinder, threading through the center of the black hole.

  A Tipler cylinder was purely theoretical. To work, it had to be infinite in length. The theory went that the cylinder of an ultradense material could rotate at such a speed that frame dragging effects would warp spacetime so outrageously that the lightcones of nearby objects would tilt backward along the time axis.

  Montrose could not see the filament itself. He assumed it was a cosmic string, also called a Kibble string. They were hypothetical topological defects—cracks in spacetime—formed in the early universe when the cosmos was smaller and hotter and topologically simply connected at all points. When the topology changed. Spacetime grew. The fundamental forces of the universe broke their primordial symmetry, gravity suddenly finding itself different in range and power from the electroweak force, and so on. Though extremely thin, with a diameter less than that of a proton, such cosmic strings were extremely dense, denser than neutronium, denser than the core of a black hole. One half mile of length was more massive than Earth. However, general relativity predicted that the net gravitational effect of a straight string on the surrounding universe would be zero: no gravitational force on surrounding matter. The only effect of a straight string would be the deflection of light passing the string.

  Obviously, photons could not touch nor rebound from such a prodigy of ultradense zero width. His instruments detected the monstrous thing merely by the redshift of the spray of x-ray particles behind it. The filament soared out of the burning core of the galaxy, curving along the thousands of lightyears ignited by the relativistic jets, and, after that, invisible.

  Such was the theory. But this string had been set into a Tipler cylinder rotation, warping space around it, and creating a naked singularity.

  Artificial or natural? At this point in his career, Montrose was willing to bet anything he saw in outer space was the deliberate creation of some mysterious and ultrapowerful race of inhuman beings.

  Whether there was a second and equal filament issuing from the other pole of the supermassive galactic black hole, Montrose was on the wrong side of the galaxy to say.

  Where the filament intersected the core black hole, however, right in the dead center of the blazing accretion disk created by the deaths of thousands of stars smearing their white-hot plasma into rings and spirals of light, was a point of darkness, and inside that point, an ultrafine point of erubescent light.

  Inside it, in miniature, glowing like a ruby, was a tissue of supergalactic clusters, walls, and voids, and the helical shape of the macrocosmic structure of the universe. It was a dark and scattered universe, glowing red like a coal, overwhelmed by something called phantom energy, a form of dark energy more potent than the cosmological constant, which forced the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. He was seeing a vision from the end of the universe, brought back into the past. He was seeing, as if through a keyhole in time, the ultimate hour of the cosmos. It was timespace on its deathbed. It was the Eschaton.

  And yet, as fascinating as this appalling and impossible mystery was, it was not where his heart was. The galaxy shrank behind him. He turned his eyes and instruments to the fore.

  There was M3, one of the greatest and brightest of the satellite clusters orbiting the Milky Way. It was like a cymbal clash transformed from sound to light: fireworks caught in mid-explosion. The splendor of a half million blue-shifted stars gleamed and beckoned.

  PART TWELVE

  Absolute Authority

  1

  An Animate Possession

  1. Collision

  A.D. 163,000

  His last clear memory was ramming the core of the M3 cluster.

  His ship, traveling at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, entered the ninety-lightyear-wide cloud of half a million stars. The core of the cluster was occupied by a Dyson Oblate of pale material thirty lightyears in diameter, twice the size it had been when Rania observed it. Whether made of matter or energy or some third thing that was neither, Montrose could not say. That he would be able to pass into it without harm was half an act of faith and half an act of madness.

  The decision had been made long ago: at the halfway point of his flight, fifteen thousand lightyears from the outermost stars of the Orion Arm, he had disdained to turn and begin the slow, long process of deceleration on the ground that it would save time to accelerate continuously the whole voyage.

  And the approach of an object with his relativistic mass at such an astronomical speed would surely ring the front doorbell. He did not intend to spend the years Rania had spent waiting patiently and politely with an audience with these arrogant alien overlords.

  He went naked out into the void, garbed in a Patrician-style body able to withstand the vacuum and radiation of space and perched on the motionless midpoint of his whirling barbell of a spaceship, a mite clinging to a thrown hammer. Milky Way was reddish and cramped behind him, distorted by relativistic effects, and the circle of stars before were bright blue and streaming visibly across his view. The Dyson Oblate was transparent at first, giving a view of the hundreds of blue-white stars and black suns ringed by fiery accretion disks, but darkened into a milky mirror when close.

  His last sight as a living man was of himself, his dark ship spread to either side like the wings of a mad devil, grinning and waving as he collided.

  2. Nonbeing

  In that instant of his death and rebirth, it seemed to him as if ancient titans, indescribable, lost in the depth of the naked singularity so far behind him and beneath, and, peering through writhing wormhole of time, regarded him with solemn sorrow mixed with wonder …

  3. Inferno to Purgatory

  A.D. 163,000 TO A.D. 163,500

  The next memory was simply darkness and pain.

  This was not the darkness of no light; it was the darkness of a mind possessing no visual cortex, no mental architecture able to process visual information, and no thalamus nor hypothalamus yearning for visual information. The pain was the inability of any thought to complete itself. His brain information had been torn into bits, as if by a careless archivist looking through the rubbish of dead minds, seeking something that might prove to be of value.

  Then came a more profound darkness: a total lack of sensory sensation or mental activity. Every now and again, he had a dim awareness of being stirred to semi-alertness. He somehow knew, without sensing it, that another mind was within his, around him, observing. Various inconceivable pains poured through him as the examiners looked yet again (he somehow knew this was not the first time) for something useful in his memory, his habit-patterns, his brain information, his skills. From time to time, some chain of thoughts or particular habit-pattern, some skill or other, would be pulled painfully out of his mind. He knew that there were many gaps in his thoughts. He stumbled across lines of thought that led nowhere, gaps in his memory, eons during which he forgot his name, forgot his humanity, and the Swiss cheese holes pierced him again and again.

  But he never forgot her. Blind beyond any ability to remember sight, he forced himself to recollect her face, the glance of her eyes, the touch of her hand. He had to rebuild, step by step, by analytical geometry alone, an understanding of how to visualize three-dimensional information, and then motion. He concentrated on the one memory no attack on his me
mory ever seemed to be able to remove. Too many things in his life led away from this memory and back toward it again; it was the time he stood on a balcony (but he could not remember on what world or in what era) beneath the fireworks of the New Year’s celebration (but he could not remember what year) nervous and eager. Had he broken into the party? Had he been invited? That too was gone. Only one thing he remembered: seeing her in the shadows, and then more clearly. She wore long gloves, opera gloves, a sash of office and a coronet, a net of diamonds in her golden hair, and, between her breasts, a gem as red and bright as fire. Rania.

  He never forgot her name. Rania.

  There she was, a slender shadow against the light of the ballroom windows behind her, stepping out on the balcony to be with him. Her every smallest gesture, the way she tilted her head, the movement of her fawn-graceful foot, was a ballet.

  And slowly, it would return to him. De Haar Castle. It was in Utrecht, part of a continent that later had been split in half, on the mother-world, Tellus, Eden, Earth, that had later been spun out of its orbit during a vast, slow war. The year had been A.D. 2400. How long had it been? It seemed like geologic ages. He recalled her voice.

  We live in a day when men have sold their souls.

  Then he would remember, after the wedding, plucking her up on his horse while the startled guests looked on, and the honor guard panicked, and his magnificent steed leaped over the heads of the astonished papal retinue, and the maids of honor screamed, and the flower girls cheered.