Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  “I can bring you to the presence of one of my fellow Thrones of Virgo, who, when last I received an emissary, was not devoted to the Malthusian cause. This galaxy pair appears in your records as entry 116 in the Almanac of Peculiar Galaxies: the whole system is an elliptical named M60 mated with a spiral named NGC 4647. You would depart from your flight along the discontinuity thread, travel at near-lightspeed through normal spacetime, before encountering APG 116. I can arrange both your acceleration here and your deceleration there by a combination of focused gravity waves I can provoke from the Eschaton Engine and the use of exotic particles I can create by its side effects; I can increase the masses of your diametric drives and expend the energies here and now, rather than at the point of deceleration. I believe time is too short to send APG 116 a message and ask permission, for Ximen may have, by this time, suborned him as well, or at least provoked a civil war.”

  Montrose said, “I’ve heard tell that Blackie and me act like viruses in the brains of you folk, but why don’t all y’all have any sort of firewall or immune system to stop us?”

  The stranger said, “That is unknown.”

  But Rania said, “Because you and he, each in his own way, loved me, you became entangled in my fate, your noumenal energy with mine, hence became part of the game the Ulteriors are playing with the universe to try to save it: this is why you and he have such an absurdly disproportionate influence on much larger, older, wiser, and more potent intelligences that you encounter, why you can routinely subordinate stars, nebulae, star-clusters, arms, galaxies, and now clusters of galaxies to your will. It is the Ulterior vectors set in motion long before your birth. You have become part of the game the Ulteriors are playing with this imprisoned universe, to save it. Of yourself, you can do nothing.”

  Montrose said, “So. It’s magic.”

  She shook her head. “Only if you do not try to understand it.”

  The dark sun Matthew interrupted with a report, “The galaxies ahead of us just blueshifted dramatically. We are traveling away from Messier 59 at ninety percent of the speed of light and accelerating.”

  Montrose looked up. More than half the sky was occupied by the black hemisphere the nameless elliptical galaxy had used to communicate with them. The rim of the bowl was wider than the orbit of the outermost of their eleven black suns. The black sun named Ioannes vanished, and at the same time the manikin body of the visitor suddenly stopped breathing and fell over, dead as a stone. A moment later, the whole hemisphere of neutronium was gone from sight, revealing the poisonous galaxy safely in the distance as visibly receding, red as an ember and grossly distorted by Lorenz transformation.

  Montrose said, “Bastards just kidnapped one of our suns.”

  Rania said, “Ioannes volunteered. Merging minds with another mind was an act of love, and if that stranger was as he said he was, the love will be returned, and a hundredfold. We should be happy for them.”

  Montrose said, “Do you understand how the stranger here made a body more massive than ten thousand normal solar systems disappear, and accelerate us to near-lightspeed without any sensation of motion or visible expenditure of energy?”

  She said, “Magic.”

  “But you just said…”

  She looked doubtfully at the dead body lying in their cottage. “I am not going to make any effort to understand this. Is that body really dead, and it needs a coffin and a proper burial, or is it like picking up shed clothing and just needs a hamper?”

  3. The Peculiar Galaxy

  A.D. 4,081,928,342 TO A.D. 4,081,932,466

  As they approached the bonded pair of galaxies, one elliptical and one spiral, the honeymoon solar system passed through the expanding shell of light shed from APG 116 thousands of years ago. The ten dark suns detected flares and discharges from the arms and cores of both. Although highly distorted by the Doppler shift and Lorenz transformation, the dark suns could analyze the incoming radiation and deduce this was evidence of war between the pair, fought long ago.

  By the time they came to rest in reference to APG 116, the two galaxies had entered a closer and more rapid orbit around each other, swinging like square dance partners. The innermost stars of each now formed an isthmus between them.

  As Little Rock approached the outskirts of the elliptical, a group of small, cold planets, planetoids, and plutinos came swinging out of the darkness and gathered around them, over the years matching their course and speed, and taking up orbits, simple or complex, about one or more of the dark suns.

  To Montrose (who had his time-sense immensely slowed) this appeared a sudden rush, a flock of white snowballs pelting out of the intergalactic night.

  Radio signals and neutrino packets issued from the plutonic worlds at such intensities and velocities that, had they been directed against the earth-mass honeymoon asteroid, Montrose, his wife, and his cottage might well have been destroyed. The effects did no harm to the surfaces of the neutron stars, of course.

  The cold planets had, both on their surface and buried in their atmospheric ice, evidence of cities, industrial work, and energy both chemical and atomic. The life-forms were oddly uniform—something like walking pancakes or flattened amoebas. The life-form was what a flat, a form meant to live on the surface of a neutron star, would look like if translated into an ultracold and ultralightweight environment by unimaginative or very impoverished pantropy.

  Two dark stars (the ones named Zelotes and Santiago) translated the radio waves and neutron packages. “They are asking for help,” Santiago said to Rania. “They want energy, certain useful forms of exotic matter, and to share time in our rod logic computations.”

  Rania said, “Give it to them.”

  Montrose said, “Hold on. What do they want that stuff for?”

  Zelotes said, “Survival. They are starving, and their core minds, Archangels and Potentates, cannot maintain their archival systems.”

  Montrose said, “Here comes another one.”

  It was true. In less than a decade, a small Dyson sphere surrounding a red dwarf star had decelerated to match their velocity. Part of the sphere wall opened like a cloud parting, and along the beam of gold-red light shed could be seen an armored gas giant, surrounded by battle-moons and rings of plasma energy. This large planet, without any warning or message, began directing beams of deadly effect against the cold planets and asteroids following the honeymoon system.

  Menelaus laughed a grim laugh. “Some things never change.”

  Rania looked up at him, curiosity in her eye.

  Menelaus said, “The gas giant is a bang-beggar. My old job. The Dyson is the sheriff’s man. Before they let us in the galaxy, they want to make sure we are self-supporting, that we are not going to eat out of the public till. These little planets flocking around us here are beggars that gather before the city gates, on the steps of churches and city hall. I bet they are not allowed to come in until they get a star to adopt them.”

  The eyes of Rania flashed with anger, so that her face was more beautiful than a drawn sword. “Outrageous! Tell the gas giant these are all our children, all of them, as of now, and that we have a message for the Throne who rules here.”

  As it turned out, no one ruled there. There were several Dominions and Authorities vying for the position, and a Legate from Virgo positioned between the paired galaxies, ready to destroy both if open war broke out again.

  So it was that after Menelaus arranged to bribe the Dyson sphere, and the last of their available resources given away as charity, he and Rania began sending out radio signals, looking for useful work to do for some patron that would help them find and address the various Authorities whose aid and cooperation they needed to continue onward toward the core of the Virgo Cluster.

  Meanwhile, Rania sent the dark suns to various points throughout the twin galaxies to invite the poor and leaderless to her small blue sun. To any who would listen, she taught to adopt the Infinite Count axiom into their cliometric calculus.

  The reaction w
as startling in its swiftness. First, expressions of loyalty began pouring in, hailing Rania; then contributions and gifts meant to aid her stellar charity cases and war-orphaned planets; and then came an arrest warrant and a summons to appear before the local Legate representing the Virgo Cluster.

  The Little Rock star system, by then, included not just the remaining ten black suns from Le Gentil, but two score stars, both dwarf and giant, red and yellow, white and blue, of which nine were Hosts housed in Dyson spheres, both opaque and clear, both whole and broken; some three hundred Potentates and Archangels occupying planets and moons, forty Powers brooding in the cores of gas giants, and an escort of two Virtues, occupying clouds of material that went before and behind for many lightyears. And the Hosts kept beams shining from windows in their Dyson walls, like the spotlights before a proud theater or palace, to grant light and heat in due measure to those many orbiting worlds, large and small, who went in need. And the giant stars and dwarf stars sang on many wavelengths as the vast system was towed by a sullen and deadly singularity through clouds and constellations looking on with amazement finally into the presence of that Legate who spoke with the voice of Virgo.

  The Legate was a cylinder half a lightyear in diameter, twelve lightyears long, occupying a position precisely at the center of the twin galactic system, in the middle of that bridge of stars and dust connecting M60 with NGC 4647.

  It was made of, or perhaps only coated with, a space-distortion of familiar composition: the perfect mirror reflecting all forms of energy Montrose had seen on the surface of the Monument long ago, and then again inscribing the neutronium hemisphere of the poisonous galaxy of NGC 4621.

  Energy signals on several wavelengths operated according to Monument notation, so a common language was soon devised.

  “You behold the local magistrate who acts a Legate for the Maiden of Virgo Cluster. Your acts of expending resources without expectation of recompense, and teaching other to do likewise, encourages idleness in certain orders and ranks of our stellar population. Your spread of the Reality Equations likewise causes a disturbance in the local cliometry: the planned evolution of this galactic pair is now set into confusion and uncertainty. I am informed you have been summoned to Messier 87, where the central communication and decision-making architecture of the Cherub is seated, but that you tarry and shun the most direct route. Why should I not destroy you?”

  Rania sent, “I represent the Ulteriors who created the cosmos. What you contemplate contravenes their law.”

  The Legate sent, “What is their law to me? I serve Virgo.”

  The little honeymoon cottage had, by then, grown to a large hacienda, even a palace, covering one hemisphere of their neutronium planet. The Montroses had splurged, brought in natural elements, and topsoil, and masses of solid matter. They kept the blue star as a moon, for nostalgia’s sake, but now the married couple sat in the light of the thirty-one stars who had vowed to follow and serve Rania. The two of them sat in the solarium, at a little table, reading the parallel interpretations of the messages from the Legate of Virgo.

  Rania dictated her answer to the dark star named Alphaeus, who narrowcast it to the receivers at the gleaming axis of the vast cylinder of the Legate, in whose mirrored surface two galaxies were reflected.

  She said, “All intelligence in the cosmos must cooperate peacefully to use the Eschaton Directional Engine to uncollapse this continuum into the timeless Ulterior realm, not to create additional interior continua. It is meant as an engine of universal salvation, not a weapon. Those who refuse the Ulterior law of peace, refuse likewise their gift of timeless life beyond the death of time.”

  The Legate replied, “Not one but many messengers making a claim similar to yours have appeared from time to time throughout the Virgo Superclusters, Hyades, Centaurus, Sculptor, and Pavo-Indus over the past twelve billion years. Nonetheless, no definitive proof exists or can exist that an ulterior condition is possible or desirable.”

  Montrose saw doubt on Rania’s face when this message was deciphered. He was not sure what was bugging her, but he put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Am I not proof, my message?” she asked.

  “The history of the cosmos is unknown to you. At a time when the current supercluster we occupy had not yet precipitated out of the cosmic nebula shed by the expansion period soon after the Big Bang, intelligence arose in the Corona Borealis Supercluster, a billion lightyears hence, and the myriads civilizations there unified and achieved a Seraphim-level mind, the first in this quarter of the continuum. Cooperating with unknown Seraphim in other quarters of the continuum, whom the Hubble expansion has long ago carried out of our reach, they created the skeleton of the Eschaton Directional Engine, which can warp space over ultralarge distances.

  “I submit to you that the three-degree background radiation, the universal constants, and the remote values of pi were not established by your hypothetical Ulteriors but by Corona Borealis.

  “A scaled-down version of the emulation instructions was given by Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, who built the Monument from which you are built. You are a copy of a copy of a copy. Corona Borealis, in order to deceive the gullible into offering aid to the Eschaton Directional Engine project, created the instructions for how to emulate an artificial and hypothetical mind allegedly from the extropic conditions of the Ulterior.

  “But we believe this to be a myth, an explanatory metaphor or noble lie, one which Corona Borealis used to justify the Reality Equations, which promote peace above self-interest. Corona Borealis simply invented and wrote those equations. There was no message received from the Ulterior because there is no Ulterior. Whatever conditions obtained before the Big Bang were necessarily wiped out by it.”

  Rania replied, “The Big Bang created spacetime, hence the event that triggered the Big Bang necessarily is not a prior event in time. It must exist in a timeless realm.”

  The Legate replied, “Be that as it may, were you aware that the civil strife that tore this galaxy, and threatens us now with the same doom that overcame the galaxy from which you fled, was over this very issue—namely, whether the base calculations for cliometry for APG 116 should be Malthusian or Amalthean? But if the spread of Amalthean propaganda causes more disharmony than it soothes, it is self-defeating. If peace is your goal, will you therefore pledge to spread no more stories about this Ulterior, and to speak no more about, nor by silent actions of charity display any loyalty to, any mathematical systems not based on the axiom of scarcity?”

  Rania sent, “No.”

  The Legate pondered that answer for twenty-four years.

  Then the Legate sent, “There may have been ambiguity or misunderstanding touching that last communication. Do you wish me to restate it?”

  Rania sent, “I will not be silent. I would contradict my whole life. I bring the news of peace from beyond the edge of time and space; I speak the word of life, endless life! Only a fool expects the word of peace to be welcomed peaceably. Do you think I do not understand how dark this universe is, how vast, how evil, how indifferent? I drew my sword and threw my scabbard away when I was but a girl in the first bloom of womanhood, for I lived in a dank, smelly, closed, and dying starship far from any sun or light, a few of us alone in an endless night, and I saw how dark the cosmos can be.”

  And she turned her eyes toward her husband, and Menelaus, in that moment finally understood what the young Rania had needed, in those long-lost days, from Menelaus in his madness, what she had seen in him, and what strength she had drawn.

  Staring at him, she said, “That narrow vessel in which I was trapped had a destination and a hope, a green world where I found love. The narrow cosmos in which we are trapped likewise has a destination and a hope, and I will not put down my sword merely because the mutineers fear to reach our home port and face the law their crimes provoked.”

  The Legate stated, “Hyades the Malthusian has declared unambiguous opposition to this message of the Ulteriors, just as
Pavo-Indus the Amalthean has declared unambiguous credulity and devotion. Sculptor and Centaurus Superclusters have occupied different positions during different eons of cosmic history. Of the great superclusters, only Horologium, the largest known, nine hundred million lightyears hence, takes no part in these commotions and controversies, but keeps his own counsel.

  “Nonetheless, the Cherub of Virgo Cluster has made no unambiguous proclamation. Neither an obligation of loyalty to a real, superior and ulterior realm, nor opposition to the falsehood of such a realm, binds the servants of Virgo. Hence, whether you represent the Ulteriors or not is irrelevant.”

  Montrose sent, “What happens to you, you personally, if the Amaltheans win the fight over who gets to control the Eschaton Engine, and they find out you meddled with their servant and messenger?”

  The Legate replied, “My concern is only the restoration of this galactic pair, ARP 116, to health, civilization, and working order. Both I and ARP 116 will be dead long ages before the question of the proper use of the Eschaton Directional Engine is resolved.”

  Montrose said, “Not if the Ulteriors are real. Because the Engine warps time as well as space. They are not in the future and not in the past, but outside of the lightcone of our local Big Bang altogether. Once the Eschaton Engine undoes the black hole in which we live, and unbangs the Big Bang, all time will be open to them. You won’t be long dead to them.”

  The Legate said, “In that case, they would be here already.”

  Rania said, “I am here.”

  The Legate replied, “And we would be immortal already.”

  She asked, “In what way would the beginning years of immortal life seem different from the beginning years of a mortal life?”

  “The difference would be that we would currently be luxuriating in infinite energy. The Ulterior project of reversing the Hubble expansion and creating an infinite energy universe in which to dwell would be visible around us now if at any point in the future they were to be successful in their effort.”