The Hermetic Millennia

by John C. Wright

  The damn thing was thousands of miles long, and the tangential velocity was over six miles a second. Flung the damn starship like a stone from David’s sling toward Jupiter, where she performed a gravitational assist maneuver to exceed the escape velocity of the solar system.

  At that point, fearing him dead and with no feasible way to decelerate, she sailed away to rendezvous with the first of the antimatter centaurs she would gather for her fuel supply, while Del Azarchel, forsaken on an Earth whose space programs he himself had gutted, watched helplessly through long-range radar as she took nine parts of his world’s entire energy supply, and hid the tenth part by nudging the centaurs into new orbits.

  Del Azarchel, in a gesture of melodramatic noblesse oblige, or perhaps frustration that his visceral desire by his own hand to shoot Montrose dead, had ordered his foe pulled from the rubble, hospitalized, and placed in cryogenic suspension in a political penitentiary. Some of Del Azarchel’s Scholar race, however, were still loyal to Rania and arranged for his escape: and the areas of the world where either Del Azarchel had no control, or pure anarchy did, were expanding.

  The struggles that followed between the factions loyal to Del Azarchel and his machine, and those opposed, laid waste to the world. The second half of twenty-fifth century had been the most violent in history, even when compared with the enormities of the Little Dark Ages. There had been a third, fourth, and fifth worldwide civil war since the violent rupture of the Concordat A.D. 2413 into northern and southern hemispheres, and countless lesser wars, invasions, insurrections, tumults, acts of nuclear blackmail. Ninety-five major cities and over a billion people had died over these wars and mega-homicides, slain by atomics, and another half billion in the depressions, famines, plagues, and migrations that followed. The horror the world had known during the Burning of New York the Beautiful had been repeated half a hundredfold. Cities famed in history would never rise again, but had gone the way of Carthage, Nineveh, and Tyre.

  And it had aged him. At times, he wondered if Del Azarchel had been causing world wars merely to force Montrose to run out his clock. After the Decivilization, the interruptions came less frequently, but they still came.

  He looked at the calendar again. His last thaw had been over two thousand years ago, A.D. 7985. Had there been no interference in history since that time? Nothing to trigger the alarm?

  Rania, by the analogous point in time in her metric, was a shade less than 7,500 light-years distant in the constellation Canes Venatici, receding at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. He could picture it perfectly in his mind’s eye: The ship’s flare would have been red-shifted so far beyond the infrared as to be in the radio range of the spectrum. From his frame of reference, the great ship was dark beyond invisibility, massive beyond neutronium, flattened in the direction of motion like a metallic pancake; and the clocks, and heartbeats, and subatomic motions aboard made a single tick once a year.

  But from her frame of reference, asleep in her coffin of ice, the ship was the same immense silver white cylinder she had always been, and her mirrored sails wider than saturnine rings spread before her, but reflecting a universe that was strange: for space-time surrounding was flattened and cold and dark and massive, and only a compressed rainbow of stars circling the ship’s equator would have seemed normal to the human eye. Directly fore of the prow, where the distortion was greatest, high-energy gamma ray point-bursts from the core of stars or dark bodies were Doppler-shifted into visibility, a pattern of fireflies.

  The only object normal to her would be the ever-shrinking dead heart of the Diamond Star, V886 Centauri, to which her ship was attached by chains, thankfully immaterial, of magnetic force. The 10-billion-trillion-trillion-carat diamond of antimatter had by now worn itself down to a mere 9 billion trillion trillion carats, one tenth of its mass already converted to propulsion. The mass of the superjovian planet Thrymheim had been long ago absorbed: now the antimatter reaction was sustained by a ramscoop, a magnetic funnel of immense size gathering up the interstellar particles, which, at her velocity, were both massive and densely packed. So she lived in a universe with one undistorted worldlet: the stub of a dead star made of contraterrene, too deadly to touch, gleaming like ice in the light from the rainbow ring of stars.

  But would there be stars? The White Ship was traveling perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, heading toward the distant globular cluster at M3, a dandelion puff of a million stars 33,900 light-years away. By now, Rania was beyond the Orion Arm, and the whole Milky Way was a wheel, red-shifted into invisibility off her stern, and the ultra-low-frequency radio auroras wreathing the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole that boiled at the core of Milky Way, invisible to mortal eyes, were visible, now, to her.

  In his imagination, he also carried a map of the Milky Way, its known stars and open clusters, which he could picture as easily as an unmodified man could picture the features of his wife’s face. The total number of stars was, of course, a bit much, even for him, so he had used a mnemonic device to memorize the vast catalog and their relative distances and motions around the galactic core.

  He took a moment to fill in this star map in his mind, and he saw that the open cluster NGC 6939 in the constellation Cepheus was not far from her route, and she would have no doubt passed through the cluster of eighty stars hanging just above the Orion Arm in order to take advantage of the gravity slingshot, and increase her velocity: from her frame of reference, the eighty stars would be more massive than the black hole at the galactic core. Her ship was as massive to them, from their rest frame of reference, as they were, from her moving frame of reference, to her. At that speed, her ship, for all practical purposes, was a singularity. When she passed through, the immense tidal and gravitic effect of her ship would perturb the scores of stars from their orbits and scatter them. The disturbance would be visible to Earthly deep sky observatories over the next millennium. In time, the stars would be too far apart to be considered a cluster.

  Princess Rania was still young, thanks to Lorenz transformations. She was still in her early twenties. Practically a child.

  And he was fifty years old!

  Less than one tenth of the Long Wait had passed. Always some little thing, the fall of empires, the genocide of races of man, some world famine, or some eruption of machine-worshiping Savants pulled him from his grave to waste ever more of his ever-lessening lifetime.

  The tube piercing his throat above his collarbone vibrated as air was forced into him. In theory, there were breathing exercises recommended to assist the Thaw process, as the cell layers lining the lungs made microscopic adjustments from the biologically suspended state to animation. Instead, through numb and drooling lips, he cussed and sobbed. He figured that was just as good.

  2. Halt-State

  “Why did you wake me? Is it time? Did she return?”

  “No, Dr. Montrose. It is still an estimated sixty-one thousand years before the earliest possible date of the return of Mrs. Montrose.”

  “Then why the plaguey hell did you plaguing wake me, you dumb horse? I told you to wake me for nothing.”

  “So I have. Nothing has occurred.”

  “What?”

  “My instructions reached a halt-state. Since I was unable to decide whether to wake you or not, I had to wake you for instructions on whether to wake you or not.”

  “You are to wake me when there is some event in the outside world needing my attention. We went over a really long list with an algorithm, that you are supposed to submit to Sir Guy or his successor, whoever the current Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitalier might be. Is there such an event?”

  “No, Dr. Montrose.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “There are no events at all in the outside world, Dr. Montrose.”

  “What the pox? Open the lid.”

  3. Man Remakes Himself

  Menelaus Illation Montrose, 7789 calendar/50 biological, climbed out of the coffin, dripping with medical fluid, n
aked, nothing in his hands but two caterpillar-drive Browning pistols.

  He stood patiently while sinuous metallic serpentines from overhead sponged off the medical fluid, when vents from underfoot dried him with blasts of warm yet pine-scented air. Meanwhile a second set of serpentines from his footlocker draped a fluffy bathrobe around his shoulders; at the same time, a third set of arms poured him a freshly brewed cup of coffee in a white porcelain cup, cream with one sugar.

  “How much coffee do we have left, Pellucid?” He tucked his pistols into the bathrobe pockets, which sagged alarmingly, so he could take the cup in hand.

  “This is the last container, Dr. Montrose. There is enough for sixteen cups. At your current ratio of slumber to thaw, and current rate of consumption, the supply will last you until circa A.D. 25000.”

  “What’s the chance of getting more?”

  “All evidence suggests that the coffee plant is extinct, Dr. Montrose. That would make the chance of getting more approach zero.”

  Montrose sipped the scalding brew thoughtfully. “Maybe I can borrow some from Blackie. Before I kill him. He’s a partner. Sure he won’t mind.”

  “All evidence suggests that Dr. Del Azarchel is also extinct, Dr. Montrose.”

  Montrose was surprised enough to spit. He glared down in dismay at the little dark splat of precious, irrecoverable coffee fluid on the steel floor, even as an alert serpentine reached in with a sterilized towel to clean it up.

  Because the neural interconnections in his brain were more efficient than those of an unmodified human, by the time the stain was wiped up, Montrose said, “Don’t bother telling me the human race is extinct. That is just a temporary setback, and I’ve got a backup plan prepared for that. And I don’t believe Blackie is dead: the ache in my bones tells me he’s alive, and he’s gunning for me. So the biosphere has been wiped out, eh? Is there machine molasses covering everything, that rod-logic liquid crystal stuff that looks like gold?”

  “No, Dr. Montrose.”

  “Well, which way did he jump? Is it a Hothouse Earth, or a Iceball Earth?”

  “I have no working cameras topside, Dr. Montrose, at this or any Tomb site. The main door will not open. It is blocked. Indirect evidence, however, suggests—”

  “Iceball Earth, then. Damnation and pestilence. I was hoping he would try a biotechnology-based civilization again, like ruled the Earth during the Eighth Millennium A.D. But if he didn’t—then what was the point of the Hormagaunts? Over a thousand years of half-human abominations and superhuman monsters—for what?”

  “The question phrasing is unclear.”

  “Sorry, Pel, wasn’t talking to you. Rhetorical questions. Looks like Blackie has outsmarted me. Machine life can prosper just dandy on a world of ice, can’t it? But what the hell happened? Why didn’t you stop it?”

  There was no immediate answer.

  Montrose said, “Pellucid, those last two questions were for you. They were not rhetorical. Give me a précis of world history while I slept, and tell me what steps you took to reverse Del Azarchel’s manipulation of the climate.”

  “While you slept, the posthuman group that rose to predominance was a gestalt-mind consisting of postwhale, postdolphin, posthuman, biotechnological, and xypotechnological elements. They were called the Melusine. The most common configuration was a whale-pod-based oceanic brain mass of immense size and complexity communicating by means of neural quantum entanglement narrowcast with five or seven human-shaped or mermaid-shaped manipulator bodies, and a swarm of lesser sensor packages, tools, weapons, and node relays housed as sea serpents, eels, snakes, and insects. The lesser bodies were thought-controlled to a cellular level, and treated like organs of the gestalt.”

  “That’s what human beings look like these days? Sheesh. Sleep a few centuries, and you miss everything. What happened to the previous civilization? The little bald men with radio antennae?”

  “The Noöspherical Cognitive Order dissolved in A.D. 8766.”

  “I introduced a vector that should have seduced them into a more freedom-loving mental-economic system.”

  “The individualism you introduced also triggered a series of world wars as political uniformity broke down. I did not wake you, because you left specific instructions not to be thawed merely for world wars.”

  “Hmf. Coronimas told me his creations were meant to be total pacifists.”

  “I believe he grossly overestimated the irenic or pacifying effect that radio-based neural connections would have on the individuals exchanging thoughts and memory chains: their wars were spectacularly brutal, and this was long before the Noösphere collapsed.”

  “Fine. So Coronimas is an idiot, and their worldwide mind library broke apart. What happened next?”

  “The electrotelepathic psychologically uniform subspecies called Locusts lingered in ever dwindling groups until the 8900s, when they were finally wiped out by Linderlings.

  “The Linderlings and Inquiline elements of the previous Noösphere could not re-interconnect their library-minds due to sociopsychological divarication. They formed smaller groups called Confraternities. Then, about nine hundred years ago, several groups combined to re-create a new fashion of mankind consisting of link-minded mating groups of five specialized sexes and subsexes, including the admixture of material from the long-extinct Cetacean races. These were the earliest forms of the Melusine.

  “As watchdogs, certain of Inquiline were designed to scan and review Melusine mental data streams, including conscious thoughts, by means of a specialized psychoscopic cadre, aided by land-based mainframes housed in mile-high arcologies called Granoliths. However, over the centuries, the exhaustion of certain critical natural resources, the increase of the polar ice caps, caused the Granolith infrastructure to fail.”

  “Why didn’t they use weather-control technology to fix it?”

  “Political considerations. The increase in ice caps altered the oceanic conditions in a way that bestowed a sudden increase on the aquacultural foundations of the Melusine economy, rendering hitherto marginal areas profitable, encouraging rapid growth and expansion, an increase in luxuries and a greater efficiency of labor, as well as an easing of coercive restrictions—I did not interfere, because these were ‘Renaissance’ conditions, akin to the political liberty and capitalist exchange-systems you have so often ordered me in the past to encourage. To maintain the previous climate would have led to insurrection, tumult, war.”

  “So Blackie snookered you. He created a ‘Roaring Twenties’ boom so you would not interfere when he lined up a sudden population drop.”

  “Perhaps that is the case. But the Melusine not only developed a space program, and planted outposts among the ruins of the partly terraformed Mars, but maneuvered the asteroid 1036 Ganymed into a sublunar orbit as a smaller second moon, honeycombed it with habitable garden-tunnels and cisterns and a spherical great lake in the hollow center. This is usually the type of project for which you express enthusiasm: I did not interfere with this course of events. Due to the increasingly hostile environment of Earth, the Melusine of Ganymed created a self-sustaining microecology, consisting entirely of artificial insects and fungi not based on any earthly models.”

  “Wow,” said Montrose, impressed. “I guess I would have been snookered too. Just add a propulsion sail, point a launching laser, and you’d have a worldlet-size starship ready to launch. I would not have interfered either. But meanwhile Earth is entering an ice age. What happens next?”

  “The balance of power between inland empires and coastal organizations could not be maintained. Then in a single generation, suddenly, the majority of remaining Inquiline either entered into full mental communion with the Melusine, which in effect absorbed them, or they refused communion and continued servicing severely depleted Granoliths, but could not track nor understand the thought patterns of the Melusine. This inferiority made them retire into lives of supine renunciation, isolating themselves from the mental life, arts and sciences, of the race.
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  “There followed strenuous efforts, over generations, of the coastal organizations to maintain the failing inland polities. The Melusine mating-harems could not maintain their population levels without the land-based agriculture to serve as an ecological basis for their human-shaped sexes. These efforts were unsuccessful due to an unwillingness of the Melusine to adapt their social customs and laws to match the new and more Spartan conditions.

  “Meanwhile, among the Inquiline, several civilizations of the remnants consumed themselves in seeking mystical experiences through pharmaceutical and electroneural manipulations. When the population fell below a critical threshold, the world electronic communion fell into disrepair, and the survivors retreated into sealed and heated city-states, surrounded by ice, and surviving on yeast, soy, and proteins pyrohydroponically grown in geothermal taps. The loss of the electronic web cut me off from real-time examination of the records of the culture, and the geothermal taps interfered with my near-surface structures to such a degree that my observation posts had to be abandoned.”

  “Wait. What? You just let these people blind you?”

  “I have no reason to suspect that they knew I existed, and your instructions make it clear that I am not allowed to kill large populations of human beings indiscriminately. I could not attack their geothermal taps without inducing starvation in the sealed city-states, and I could not continue my near-surface subterranean activities without being detected by the taps.”

  “You are allowed to defend yourself if Blackie is using some trick to encroach on the Tomb system.”

  “The ecological and climactic changes appeared to be natural, therefore my self-defense imperative had no legal parameter in which to act.”

  “Snot and skunk phlegm! Del Azarchel must have found out about you—probably for a long time—and worked out a statistical camouflage to hide the demographic and climactic changes over the centuries in the white noise, so your pattern-seeking subroutine would not see it, even though it was right before your eyes.”