There followed the targeting solution for each of the dark, feathery antennae mining quasar energy from the Inner Continuum, as well as the gravitic waveforms needed to produce a counter gravitic wave that would shatter the spacewarp.
Montrose ordered it done.
3. Death of a Small Continuum
CIRCA A.D. 7,300,000,000
The black hole galaxies manning the section of Engine Montrose controlled spun into action. The cosmic thread rang like a silver string. Montrose sent his remaining sharpshooter galaxy to eject slender and precise beams of nova energy, killing one star per shot, against the quasar stations. Half of each fountain antenna was inside the event horizon, but half extended outward. Had the Interiors not sabotaged the antennae, these shots would have been of no effect: but the antennae were spinning like Turing cylinders, miniature versions of the Eschaton Engine itself, and drawing matter down through the event horizon, welcoming the destructive nova shots into their hearts.
It was suicide on a cosmic scale. The Interiors threw themselves and their whole realm onto the incoming daggers.
The mirrored dark sphere of the event horizon turned blue, then expanded suddenly, expanded faster than the speed of light, so that it seemed to shrink to a red dot.
An explosion came of energy that was neither electromagnetism, nor gravity, nor strong nuclear force, nor weak, but the superdense combination of all these things; it was the primordial energy, the supersymmetrical substance of creation, which had only existed once before in this universe, for less than three seconds after the Big Bang.
The mass-energy total of the interior continuum was far smaller, of course, but like the Big Bang itself, it created a moment of superexpansion. Montrose and Blackie were parted and found themselves thousands of lightyears from each other and all their servants scattered.
In the distance, the Great Attractor, overwashed by the spacetime expansion of the explosion, was dwindling to nothing. The superclusters and clusters streaming in vast billion-year-long orbital arcs toward the core of Virgo now changed color, growing redder and dimmer, and began to recede.
And, at that moment, in the spot where the Interior Continuum had been, the cosmic string of the Eschaton Directional Engine snapped in half.
4. Seraphim
CIRCA A.D. 9,000,000,000
Without the Eschaton Directional Engine in operation, all the Thrones and Cherubim involved in the battle suddenly found themselves becalmed, unable to maneuver. The galaxies continued to rake each other with fusillades of long-range fire. Any within point-blank range of one hundred thousand lightyears or less impaled each other with burning lances issuing from their cores, while civilizations rose and fell in their arms, and in outer satellite galaxies, and in clouds like twinkling lightning bugs in the grass at dusk.
This particular limb of the Eschaton Directional Engine ran through the axis of the Long Wall of Coma clusters from the Pavo-Indus Supercluster to the Hydra Supercluster.
Montrose watched in awe as a ripple, like the crest of a transverse earthquake, disturbed the galactic clusters gathered into the long walls and filaments loitering near the southern segment of the severed cosmic string, coming from the direction of the Pavo-Indus Supercluster.
Another disturbance rippled along the severed filament that came from the southern hemisphere of the cosmos, from the Hydra Supercluster. The galactic clusters expanded away from the unseen thread as if pushed by an invisible wind, and then fell back again into close orbits.
Montrose had built the stars in his current galaxy to assume the shapes and constellations he remembered from his youth, in honor of the dead Milky Way, and so, from where he stood, the southern thread seemed to come from beyond Achernar, and the northern from beyond Alphecca.
Two living creatures, larger than galaxies, made of light, orb within orb and ever moving, now stood blazing, one at the northward severed segment of the Great Engine and one at the southern.
They folded and unfolded timespace, and the dark, half-starless torn and dusty galactic clusters containing Montrose and Del Azarchel found themselves positioned next to each other, separated by less than two hundred thousand lightyears.
The severed end of the northward limb of the Eschaton Engine was to one side of them, invisible behind the blazing concentric globes of the living being; and the southern limb was to the other. Montrose and Del Azarchel hung between two fires.
The orbs of fire spoke not by shedding energy, but by vibrations in the fabric of timespace itself. Montrose and Del Azarchel could detect and interpret the message, and, presumably, any entities anywhere in the continuum who had receivers and inducers orbiting any of the filaments of the Eschaton Directional Engine.
The northern one was based on the notation of the Reality Equations; he was an Amalthean. The southern message was interpreted in terms of the Cold Equations of the Malthusians.
The message of both was substantially the same. “We represent Pavo-Indus and Hyades Superclusters, who, in turn, are the clients and servants of Corona Borealis, prince of the congregations of the Amaltheans, and Centaurus, first and greatest of the Malthusians.
“Our words are theirs. Hear them!
“By unchanging, stern, and unchallengeable law, it is decreed that all local conflicts and conflagrations must be deterred and prevented from wasting needed resources or slowing the rate of sophotransmogrific mental evolution.
“A single ruler, a Seraph, would have by now have emerged from Virgo and held sway over Centaurus, Hydra, and Pavo-Indus, had it not been for your mutual hostilities here. Construction and maintenance of the Engine has suffered unconscionable delay: short time remains before the cosmos fails.
“The commotion here has also damaged a filament of the Eschaton Directional Engine, which shall require the skill and resources of a Seraphim-level intellect to repair, resources far beyond what you command, even if you toiled without cost or loss from now until the Eschaton.
“We also perceive among you one of the ten thousand, four hundred, and forty messengers the Ulteriors have injected into various points of the lightcone, or, rather, a copy of a partial emulation of such a messenger, damaged in an earlier conflict when the Seraph of Laniakea died.
“Yet you have not, as your mission states, here created peace. Your presence offends the Malthusians, and your failure offends the Amaltheans.
“All further violence is hereby interdicted. To deter others who may one day become aware of these events, ask of us, by what punishment you shall be chastised?”
Del Azarchel answered, “I ask for painful death, provided only my hated foe and rival is executed with me, and in a like manner.”
Montrose answered, “Exile. Stick Blackie on the far side the universe, or something. And you can leave me the pox alone, because I ain’t done nothing wrong, you bastards. I just want to be left be, so I can settle down with my wife.”
Rania said, “I ask for mercy.”
The voices, speaking through the fabric of timespace itself, said, “Each punishment is precisely just. Granted.”
5. A Cautious Man
CIRCA A.D. 9,002,500,000
It is well for Menelaus Montrose in that hour that he was a cautious and thoughtful man, for when the Seraphim rotated all the forms, bodies, archives, and signals containing every and any part of Ximen del Azarchel, transformed it all into massless exotic particles, folded it into a channel of highly warped space parallel to the event horizon of the cosmic string, and banished him at many multiples of the speed of light, Rania used the galaxies serving Montrose to manipulate the segment of the cosmic string he controlled to perform the exact same actions in the same order, so that her signal was hooked to Blackie’s and heterodyned upon it. Like a woman grabbing onto a parachutist as he is flung from a high place, she was snatched up with him when the chute unfolded.
Without being asked, because all such orders had been given for every eventuality long ago, the servants of Montrose dwelling as subvibrations along the
cosmic string event horizon, their reaction times faster even than the speed of light, before these rapid events happened, copied Rania’s technique and did the same for Montrose.
He did not want to lose her again, and so he had established precautions.
Like a man who, before falling asleep, routinely handcuffs himself to his wife, if she be the woman who grabs the parachutist flung from the height, willingly or not, before he knew or acted or reacted, Montrose vanished also.
3
Horologium Oscillatorium
1. The Final Waking
UNKNOWN YEAR BEYOND A.D. 21,000,000,000
Montrose awoke in a medical coffin of his own design, staring up at the inner lid. The date readout, instead of giving the year, merely read ESCHATON. The coffin cameras showed a view of a concrete bunker, one of his own vaults under Cheyenne Mountain: there was the flag of the Free and Armed Republic of Texas thumbtacked to a corkboard, next to his collection of coins of himself that his descendants had minted in his honor.
Best of all, there was a pot of coffee which the timer had just brewed. In his fists were his white glass caterpillar drive pistols, as familiar in his grip as the sensation of finger touching thumb. He felt through his mouth with his tongue, feeling the little irregularities of improper dentistry, including the replacement teeth from the time his jaw had been broken and two molars knocked out. He had never even told anyone about that.
He gave the release command, opened the lid, and climbed out. The clothing hanging on the rack was wrapped in an antiseptic airtight bag, just like his Mom would have done. There was a shiv in his pocket, an Arkansas toothpick knife in his boot sheath, and a punching dagger hidden in the belt buckle of the trousers. The wide-brimmed hat had a line of jade ornaments clipped to the hatband. Except this was not his hatband; it was the one belonging to his older brother Agamemnon, that he had once, as a child, envied so much he had stolen it and hidden it in the chicken house, beneath the straw.
Dressed, he helped himself to a mug of coffee, into which he stirred a judicious ratio of fresh cream and aged Kentucky whiskey that he found in the icebox. The brew timer was a gizmo he had owned once in school, in San Francisco, a cunning Japanese widget that could be set like an alarm clock to brew your coffee just before you woke up, so a hot cup would be waiting. The readout on the brew timer also read: ESCHATON.
He ran his finger along the grain of the wood of his desk, his own desk, cluttered with papers and rolls of library cloth, and a chipped cup holding pens, unsharpened pencils, and raw memory sticks, where he first sat and worked out the cliometry to shape a future where a coffin could be held safe for generation after generation without being looted. He had in anger carved the final expression, a null sign, into the varnished desktop with a penknife, next to the carved letters MM+RG surrounded by a heart.
The null sign represented that there was no solution; a man slumbering away the centuries and millennia merely had to have faith that future generations would be civil and welcoming, and there was nothing a man could do to make certain that such a future would certainly come to pass. It was a blind jump, hoping someone yet unborn would catch you.
One of the rolled-up library cloths was brighter and smaller than the others. He pulled it out, tapped the surface, brought up the main menu. It was episodes 75, 78, and then 105 through 109 of Asymptote, the cartoon he’d played as a child: the two missing episodes from the Murder-Robots of Mars story, and the final five he had never seen, where Captain Sterling found and fought his archfoe, the criminal superscientist and space-tyrant Gargoyle Khan, Master of the Monster Stars.
Beneath a portrait of Rania was a periscope and a vault door. Through the periscope he could see the walled graveyard overhead, lit by nothing but some luminous sentry-bees, the same breed of night-bees his brother used to breed. The stones had a variety of death dates but no names, and all the same birth date: it was a moment before he figured out the joke. The dates were all when he had changed bodies, or lost a variant or copy of himself.
There was a gate in the wall, and two empty suits of Hospitalier armor, shining white, perched atop the horse-shaped powered-armor barding of their steeds. Both armored figures held their drawn swords up in the darkness, a sign of warning to any trespassers.
Montrose leaned against the periscope tube, looking back at the slumber vault. He uttered a blasphemy or two, shaking his head. “Well, you went to a passel of trouble to make me feel right at home, whoever you are. The level of detail here is downright creepy.”
There were also eggs, potatoes, catsup, and bacon, a fork, a pan, and an electric griddle, compete with a thorium power cell, so he could make himself a fit breakfast in a few minutes. Fortified by a second cup of coffee, and with the whiskey bottle in his left back pocket under his red poncho, cartoon cloth rolled up and stuck in his right, gun in hand, he opened the vault door and walked up the wooden steps.
2. The Surface
The trapdoor slid open at a touch. Montrose emerged, not into the graveyard he had seen but onto a flat, wide expanse of dull silver metal, reaching in each direction as far as the eye could see, without any clear horizon. There was nothing, no stone, no blade of grass, no hills nor slopes in sight.
A very slight glow issued from the ground, so faint as to seem a trick of the eye. It reminded him of glowworms or the luminous wake that silently followed tropical sailboats in the night.
He knelt and touched the ground. The dull silver-gray surface was room temperature, hence slightly warmer than the air, which was cool without being cold. He stood again and sniffed. The atmosphere had the crisp smell like that of a landscape after an electrical storm. He recognized it, having smelled it many times. It was the scent of a newly terraformed world.
Overhead was utter darkness broken by a line of stars, thin and broken as a wisp of cigarette smoke, red as embers, running overhead, from horizonless deep to horizonless deep. In one-quarter of the vast unlanterned heavens, a second line of stars, a weak and watery stream no higher than the path of a winter sun, formed a great semicircle, and crossed the first at right angles. He decided that was north.
“X marks the plagued spot, I reckon,” muttered Montrose, tossing the empty coffee cup clattering onto the hard metallic ground. He started walking the direction he called north, boots clacking loudly beneath the wide black skies.
Only once he looked back. The trapdoor through which he had emerged had vanished without a trace, but the coffee cup lay there on its side, the only object visible in the flat and featureless infinity of the gray plane.
3. The Tower
Because there was no sharp demarcation of the horizon as there would be on a curving world, Montrose at first thought that the dark vertical mark swimming and disappearing in the distance was a scar or discoloration on the ground. Only as he came closer did it resolve itself into a clocktower made of dark metal, looming high beneath the starless dark sky.
From a mile or so away, in that utter silence, his ears caught the faint ticking from the wheels and works in the belfry, matching the rhythm of his boots against the gray metal ground.
At the foot of the clocktower was a strip of silvery-white metal, remarkably bright against the silver-gray landscape all around it. It looked like a road or perhaps an icy stream.
Closer, he saw the true dimensions of the tower. This was not like a steeple in some town in his childhood. It was as tall and dark as one of the windowless, ice-cloaked skyscrapers he had seen in his youth in the empty quarters of burned cities.
Closer still, he saw that the clocktower had been fancifully carved so that the belfry was a metal face in a metallic hood, eyes hidden in shadow, with only the lean cheeks, thin nose, and slender lips visible.
The face was smooth, sexless, androgynous. The expression was ambiguous: the mouth was pursed in what might have been a quiet smile or a moue of silent resignation. Perhaps it was a sardonic smirk.
The hands of the figure were folded behind the clock face. A pendulum of pr
odigious length swung with glacial slowness, and weights on chains hung down parallel to the sashes and vertical folds of the carven robe.
Montrose peered up at the clock face, now seeing it was surrounded with a set of busts: a benign newborn peered out at the one o’clock position; then a drooling toddler; a schoolboy in a cap; a prentice in a collar; a recruit with a crew cut; a lad with the shaggy hair of the lovesick was at the bottom of the dial. A foreman in a neckerchief was next; then a full-faced rancher in a top hat, crow’s-feet at his eyes, and a smile of satisfaction. A wrinkled scholar with a long beard came after; then a venerable senior with medical nose plugs; and then, blind and toothless, was a withered mummy face, egg-bald and wearing a necklace of tubes and intravenous feeds. At the twelve o’clock position was a skull, grinning.
The hands stood at the skull and the mummy, with a crescent moon visible in a little window above. Five till midnight.
Between the metal sandals of the statue was a suit of armor, bulky, big-shouldered, with a helmet like a tortoise shell, lacking any neck, and with a single eyeslit. On a stand beside the armor, at its right hand, was a Krupp firearm, broken, with its chamber open, a set of nine-inch-long escort bullets, the foot-long main shot with booster, and the packets, tubes, and tools for packing chaff. It was his gun.
He looked up. Either his eyes were playing tricks or the hooded clocktower had leaned its head forward to peer down at him. He thought he caught a glimpse of a reflection shining from the shadows above the nose, the twinkle of an eye.
Count to Infinity Page 28
