She said, “You presume where you know nothing. The Ulteriors will not disturb any events in time that you have committed, for that would offend the dignity of your free will, but when you in this frame of reference die or seem to die, then the Ulteriors can and will act, or, already have acted, and always will. There is no death; your mental information is removed at right angles to the lightcone and cannot be perceived by any senses remaining trapped within linear time. The operation of the Eschaton Engine is a logical precondition, not an event prior in time taking place in this stream of time. The Engine is matched with an Ulterior mate called the Genesis Engine, which is not within the lightcone at all, not within the passage of time, so its operation cannot be seen inside times past or present.”
The Legate said, “If so, then, logically, no observer could independently confirm your words, because all are within the lightcone.”
Menelaus said, “How ’bout if I kick you in your plague-ridden silver metal bunghole you if you call her a liar again?”
She said, “Please disregard that last remark. An observer outside the lightcone could observe all these true things, and enter timespace, and report on conditions outside it. If such an observer did such a thing, would his words not be precisely like mine?”
The Legate said, “I can see you intend no deception, but you could be deceived. The idea that you are the agent of extradimensional beings, or have the authority to speak for them, is absurd.”
“Or what else explains that I speak the same way as Corona Borealis Supercluster, one billion lightyears from here? If it is madness, you would have to judge the Corona Borealis Supercluster to be mad. Can you judge such a mind?”
The Legate sent, “No.”
“Is Virgo confident that the Ulteriors do not exist?”
“As I have said, Virgo makes no pronouncement binding on her servants.”
“If the Amalthean argument were true, what would be different in any evidence or proof that has reached you?”
“Nothing would be different. Both the Amalthean and the Malthusian model of the universe explain, or explain away, exactly the same body of astronomical and teleological evidence.”
“Then your conviction is not based on evidence. On what is it based? Why do you decide to live in a universe of death and war rather than a universe of peace?”
“Very droll,” sent the Legate. “I have no answer. Little life-form, you almost convince me to be an Amalthean. You raise issues beyond my competence to decide. However, I have technique, known only to higher servants of Virgo, to induce a gravitic reaction from the Eschaton Directional Engine from even as a remote location as this, bypassing any further node points, stations, or interruptions. Prepare yourselves. These others you have suborned to your oddly open-ended moral and legal system shall accompany you; they will share your fate, be it reward or condemnation, whatever Virgo shall decide.”
The entire galaxy around them seemed to shrink into a star-colored rainbow surrounding the now-crowded Little Rock star system, and the zenith above was white with the three-degree background radiation, now visible as cosmic rays, and the nadir turned red, becoming radio waves of ever-lengthening pitch.
4. The Presence Chamber
A.D. 4,101,958,467
Montrose awoke, surprised to find he had slept. His head was in the lap of Rania, who was sitting on what seemed a shining floor of woven metal, bright as a mirror.
The odd sensations in his body made him look carefully at his hands, rubbing his fingers together. Every skin cell seemed to be coated with a diamond grit, and each mote of bright sand was glowing with a light, pale or dusky, blue and red and yellow together forming an intricate texture of white. Little sparks fell glittering from his fingertips where he rubbed free some dry flakes of skin.
He looked up at Rania’s face. Her features were flowing and glowing with light. Montrose wondered if the dream Andromeda had presented to him had been a symbol or foreshadowing of some strange reality.
“What happened to us? Where is our gigantic pet solar system and all those suns who were following you around? The little planets we adopted to be our kids?”
She said, “Virgo took them away. You objected.”
“Damn right!”
“And now you are recovering from being struck. Part of your memory has been permanently erased, on the theory that no one is allowed to remember insulting the Maiden. We are in her presence now, right now, in her throne room. In the middle of our trial. So watch your language!”
Above her head, Menelaus could see white and luminous clouds against a black night; the sight of galaxies seen from an intergalactic dark, but only if the galaxies were crowded closely enough and were active enough with supernovae and Seyfert emissions to be visible to the naked eye.
He felt the same sensation as he had once had looking up at the crowded skies of a globular cluster after having been raised beneath the nearly empty night skies of Earth, except now the sensation was on a higher order of magnitude.
Virgo Cluster was a giantess. Two thousand galaxies were under her control, and her realm stretched across a diameter of fifteen million lightyears. Her volume was not much larger than the Local Group had been, but she contained fifty times the number of galaxies, most of which were larger and more energetic than the Milky Way.
It took him a moment to recall the sensation. It was the same he had felt once, long ago, the hour after sunset when on horseback he had crested the rise leading down to the San Francisco Bay and in the distance beheld the metropolis, once American, now Japanese. It was not a small, dark smudge like Houston had been, dotted with watch fires and campfires of the sentries. The central buildings of San Francisco were lit with electric lights, and three of the skyscrapers had lights glowing through windows at the top.
Like the echo of an echo, he recalled the first time as a child trudging through the snow on market day when he beheld the roadless cloverleaf column that formed the citadel of Bridge-to-Nowhere, a column which to his boyish eyes seemed tall enough to hold up the sky. And the Japanese skyscrapers were taller than that.
“Are we out of doors?” he asked as he rose to his feet. “I don’t think we…”
His words died.
At first, his mind could not conceive where he was, either in a vision, or aboard a vessel, or on a world.
It looked as if he and Rania stood or sat on the ring of Saturn, if the ring were semisolid, made of mirror-bright liquid metal flowing without a ripple, and the planet black, an orb of darkness visible only because of the scarlet, pink, and dark red fans and darts of light spread behind it to one side, and indigo, azure, and royal purple spread behind it to the other.
The view was something like a solar eclipse, with the corona of the sun visible like the wings of a phoenix afire behind it.
The mirrored expanse of the disk on which they stood curved in a vast arc behind the flame-winged black sphere, whose outline was sharply visible where the silver road vanished behind it to the east and reappeared to the west.
A ring of evenly spaced moons orbited the dark orb, beyond the outer ring of the silver ring system, visible in the red and blue firelight. The small moons on the far side were full; the larger and closer were gibbous; the gigantic moons near at hand were crescents.
He saw what seemed atmospheres and storm systems on the moon surfaces and thought perhaps these satellites were gas giants whose clouds were interrupted by flashes of high-altitude lightning.
But as his eyes picked out regularities and patterns of motion in the colored bands or spiral swirls, he realized he was looking at the surface activity of Dyson spheres. What seemed clouds were instead some mechanical or organic motions of the panels, sails, and scales of the outermost wall, perhaps agitation caused by the passage of planetary bodies passing in and out. The lightning discharges might be information beams brushing against motes or worlds in the orifices, or glimpses of the suns and supernovae hidden at the core.
He returned his eyes to th
e black sphere, so huge it made the Dysons less than the toy balls on the nursery floor. Now he knew what it was: a supermassive black hole, greater in mass than all the galaxies he had ever visited together.
He was standing on what looked like an accretion disk, but an impossible, artificial disk, whose tidal stresses were precisely controlled, perhaps being used as an energy source.
Looking carefully, now he spotted a thin line of silver material being peeled continuously off the innermost ring of the mirror-bright substance. Unlike a natural and turbulent accretion disk, this one was throwing matter into the black hole in a smooth and precisely controlled fashion.
The silver flow was a like a zero-gee river falling in a smooth spiral, winding once and twice and thrice around the whole equator of the supermassive black hole before turning red, then black, and encountering the invisible event horizon. The red light was the energy liberated by the tidal stress disintegrating the silvery matter, some of which escaped as waste heat, shining from the western hence receding hemisphere of the rotating black hole; the blue fires were from the eastern and advancing hemisphere. The event horizon diameter was so vast and the rotation rate so immense that the light was coherent and Doppler shifted.
5. Luminiferous Bodies
Eventually Montrose recovered himself enough to speak.
“Is this an illusion? A simulation? Something hexing up our brains?”
She slipped her dainty hand in his and looked in the direction his eyes were turned. Her cheek was almost brushing his shoulder. “I cannot hear you unless we are touching.”
She said, “All you see is real. We are standing on the accretion disk of a rotating supermassive black hole at the core of the Messier 87 elliptical supergiant galaxy. I am not sure if the sensation of earth-normal gravity is due to the thickness of the disk underfoot or is due to electromagnetic fields anchoring each cell of our bodies in place.”
He looked down at himself, only now realizing he and she were naked, clothed only in the light their skins gave off. “This reminds me of M3. What happened to our bodies? Don’t the plague-bedamned aliens believe in clothes?”
“Watch your language. Virgo is still listening. Court is still in session. I don’t want to see you chastised again.”
“Fine!” He sighed. “What happened to us? What did the blessed and happy alien monsters do to us?”
He saw that there was an outline of blue surrounding her form, a nimbus of air. He took a deep breath. The sensation was normal. It smelled like the crisp air of a mountaintop, perhaps with a hint of ozone presaging a mountain storm. But the air seemed to be coming from an envelope or sleeve of atmosphere clinging tightly to his form. With her hand in his, their atmospheres mingled, and he could smell her hair.
She answered, “Each cell of bone and brain and blood has been replaced by a set of structures, perhaps force fields, of astronomical size. I do not have a basis of comparison, but I assume each cell is at least the size of an inner solar system. Our bodies are made of a balance of exotic and conventional matter, so our mass is low, perhaps negative. Diametric drives allow the cells to mimic the motions of living things, blood pumping, nerve cells thinking, lungs breathing, and so on. The replica is exact down to the smallest detail. I assume what is skipping from nerve cell to nerve cell is a simulated electric charge, a set of planet-sized nested fields, not normal neural energy. Our original bodies were destroyed.”
Montrose touched his finger to his nose and then straightened his arm, jerking the finger away. He thought he saw the fingernail turn slightly red as it receded. “What the hell, uh, happy, for?”
She said, “I assume it is a partly symbolic act, partly a matter of conspicuous consumption, partly a practical measure to make us large enough and slow enough for the Maiden to address us. Or, at least, those Thrones who form the central decision-making structure of the Maiden.”
Montrose nodded. Addressing the whole of Virgo Cluster would be like addressing the whole senate of some widespread empire. One thought-impulse would require fifteen million years at lightspeed to go and return from the outer boundary of this galactic-cluster-sized brain. It was five hundred thousand lightyears from the core to the rim just of this supergiant galaxy alone. He also did not know how far their time rate had been slowed by being so deep in the gravity well of the singularity.
Rania said, “You don’t remember because Virgo just did some sort of retaliatory brain surgery on you, but rest assured you spoke your piece. It is my turn to address the court now. Can you keep your peace and follow my lead?”
He muttered, “Is this what it is like to be married?”
She said, “I don’t know. My years with Ximen don’t count. I will step back and let you do all the talking, if you like.”
Montrose was surprised and looked down at her glowing, starry countenance. Her eyes were full of nothing but gentle love for him, and trust. He said, “You are the supernatural messenger with a supernatural message, not me. And smarter than me, or at least with better manners.”
She said, “I am also your wife.”
“What the, uh, happy, does that mean?”
“Our species is extinct, our galaxy gone. We are Adam and Eve. I read Milton as a child. The tale of losing paradise convinced me. Things go better when wives esteem their husbands and unarguing obey and don’t try to become like gods.”
“But you actually are a goddess. Or near enough. A superior form of being.”
She said, “You do not believe what the Legate of APG 116 told us? That I only thought I was an Ulterior because I am a copy of a hypothetical simulation of one?”
He shrugged. “The real me died a long time ago. I long ago lost track of what happened to my original brain. I remember having it on Sedna before Cahetel attacked, and I had some sort of body aboard the Solitude, but whether the Cataclysmics gave me a new one or not, M3 surely did. And then after that…” He shrugged. “Of course, I heard once that every seven years or so every cell in your body dies and is replaced, so I reckon I am standing in the same spot as I would be if I were the real Montrose, and that makes me him. And you are you. When M3 sent False Rania back to Earth, the part he left out, the part that formed the real you, the part I knew immediately something was wrong when it was not there, that was the part I came all this way to find. You’re a goddess as far as I am concerned.”
She dimpled but said, “I also read Homer. Goddesses could use some humility as well. Besides, if we live, I mean to have children, and I cannot expect obedience from them if I do not yield obedience to you. Did your mother never explain how happy marriages work?”
“Back in the day, my top sergeant in the pony soldiers was not as tough as my Mom, which was one reason I almost liked the cavalry. I guess my Dad must have been quite the character if he could rein her in. She’d spit in the eye of the devil himself, if he came in the house without wiping his hoof on the mat.” Montrose said, “Did I really already say everything I meant to say?”
“You did your mother proud and spit in the eye of this great entity bedeviling us.”
“Did I?”
“You made many references to bodily functions of excretion and copulation, many diseases, epidemics, and divine beings. You explained about your history with Ximen and showed that he lied to Virgo about Andromeda. You asked him to be brought to justice, and the Maiden curtly refused.” Rania raised her hand and pointed. “There, there, and there. Those three Seyfert galaxies, and all the globular satellite galaxies and star clouds surrounding. That is where Ximen del Azarchel is now. He is greater than a mere Throne. He is in the audience. Listening. It will take years for the signals to reach him, but the constituent members making up the Virgo Cluster mind-group are listening.”
“So I asked for Blackie’s head,” Montrose said, “and how did Virgo answer?”
“By swatting you like a bug.”
Montrose sighed, then sniffed. “How are we breathing, again?”
“More structures or force fields
are acting as air molecules, large-scale copies. Some of our thinking information is stored in them, too.”
Montrose said, “Speak your piece. I’ll stand mum. I appreciate that you are willing to be all gentle and wifely with me, but I know what makes the world turn, and there was never a war started nor a peace made without some princess telling her prince to go to it.”
“In all my years, no one who was strong enough to shoulder the burdens I bore was with me,” she said. “I weary of giving commands to crewmen and children. You decide. What is the point of having a husband, if he is not my captain for me? What else are men for? No one else can be the man for me.”
“You can obey me, as a good bride should, but you got to tell me what to do, so I can be a good bridegroom. I ain’t never done this before, and so this old world is still all new to me.”
Rania nodded, a small smile bright on her bright face, a touch of red on her starry cheek. Menelaus could not recall seeing her look shy before. “My world is also new. You have made me new.”
6. The Final Apologia
The shyness fell away when Rania raised her head and spoke in a regal and ringing voice toward the dark fire-winged orb ahead of them. Montrose nostalgically recalled this voice from their brief season on Earth before their marriage, from her public appearances. This was a princess speaking. He smiled. To think she had doffed her hard crown and donned a soft bridal veil for him!
A wheel of interior satellites, invisible until they opened, formed a ring around the darkness. Now they drew aside the walls of Dyson spheres to reveal small ember-red stars. It looked like a line of eyes staring at them, immortal, unearthly, and cold.
“Noble Cherub, your greatness and dignity is beyond compare; you are mighty indeed to those subservient to you, even as you defer to those more excellent than yourself.
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