The Architect of Aeons (40 page)

Montrose saw the expansion plans of Ptolemy's Cluster at eight hundred lights away, one of the closer servants races. The servant of Praesepe farthest from Earth was seated in the Cone Nebula, over two thousand lightyears away.

Xi Persei in the California Nebula, fifteen hundred lights from Sol, was the center of an immense globe of expansion, far outstripping the modest effort of Hyades. The smallest globe of expansion was in M42, also called the Orion Nebula, at sixteen hundred lights centered at Trapezium Cluster, where the civilization was busily making new stars. The cliometric mathematics displayed on side screens associated with these stars showed that Orion Nebula was destined to outstrip and overtake his master, the Dominion at Praesepe. This would take place in roughly a billion years.

And these maps did not reach beyond two thousand lightyears. Everything here was within one small segment of the Orion Arm. A few points in the Sagittarius or Perseus Arms were depicted, such as Ximen del Azarchel's destination and flight path—yes, the motion of a vessel that large and that fast was observable to any large-scale orbital telescope. But few or no shipping lanes crossed between arms of the galaxy, and no downward chains of command. Where a shipping lane did cross the void between arms, one or more artificial columns or streamers of dust and nebular material had been constructed like a bridge. It was the opposite of what he would have expected. Emptier space was less economical for the starfaring civilizations to cross. That implied some sort of hydrogen ramscoop ship technology at work.

He corrected himself. He could not conclude that all starfaring civilizations were so limited. M3, for example, an Authority occupying a cloud of five hundred thousand stars, was orders of magnitude more powerful than these little polities of fifty or five hundred stars. Their chains of command reached across galactic distances all the way to Sol. The Authority technology could be as far beyond the Hyades as the Hyades was beyond Jupiter.

The largest scale star charts displayed the relative position of the arms of the Milky Way and the subgalaxies orbiting the core, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy would almost complete one orbit of the Milky Way in that period of time before the gravitic and tidal forces disrupted its structure, and brought its stars slowly into indistinguishable union with the other Milky Way stars.

Montrose, looking at the time values for those predictions, had the disorienting sensation of being a mayfly looking at a mountain. Surely, the mountain would wear down in time, but when measured in terms of the number of mayfly lives added end-to-end, it became horrendous.

Then he wondered if any currents, whenever they crossed his path, felt Montrose was such a mountain.

“Ridiculous!” he said to himself. “I am just like any other man.” And he put the thought into a side pocket of his perfect memory to have a subpersonality examine later in more depth. For the moment, he wanted to concentrate on the alien.

Why was it showing him this material?

“Do you have a name?” he asked aloud.

The black-coated, dripping skull seemed to be looking at him. The voice of the serpentine came from several of the nearby screens at once:
Answered previously. We are the Cahetel of Hyades.

“That is the name we call you. Have you no name for yourself?”

Have you no name for yourself
.

For a moment, he wondered why the creature was repeating him. The voice was without inflection, since the creature had not mastered the nuances of using spacing, tone, and pitch for information, so he did not realize it had asked him a question.

He said, “Menelaus Montrose.”

That is the name your mother called you. Have you no name for yourself?

It learned quickly. That sentence ended on a high note, indicating a question.

“I did not pick my own name when I was christened.”

Nor did we
.

And in this sentence there was a clear hint of dry humor in the tone of voice. It learned quickly indeed.

He did not know which was worse, that this creature had actually made an indirect point in a fashion he understood, or that the creature had access to his dead self's memories, and could read some or all of them.

Perhaps anticipating his thoughts, the entity spoke again.

Names issue from the verbal centers of ideation, occupying a mono-topological plane of the mental procedural ecology. Your Potentate had begun to experiment with multiple mental topographies, but intellects beneath the Virtue level are restricted to a single dimension of thought-to-symbol rationality. The Virtue Cahetel is polydimensional, ergo mental topological transformations no longer concern us. We employ preverbal structures for symbolization between signifiers and signified, and one-to-one unambiguities between signified logic relations.

That was more like it. That sounded like an alien. Poxing incomprehensible.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Since the serpentine was using the same voice pattern as the alien, Montrose for a moment thought the alien was answering: “He is requesting a clarifying simplification.” But no, the serpentine was explaining Montrose's comment to the entity.

The Cahetel entity spoke. Again, its voice betrayed more nuance. It almost sounded alive. Not quite.

Simplification: Our system uses different and unique names for different and unique object-events in the extensions of spacetime matter-energy, and symbolizes similarities of category by nominal similarities. Since we are not the same Cahetel now as when the moment ago we began to speak, we have no consistent name to offer.

“You seem the same to me.”

That is a limitation of your perception. If you insist on aberrant symbolism, call me Menelaus Montrose. His memory information now serves Hyades.

He is, as we are, of Cahetel. He is, as we, of Ain. He is, as we, of Hyades.

Menelaus Montrose will not endure. The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

5. The Fellow Servants

That comment made a tremor run through him. Montrose was surprised at himself. Was talking to this abomination actually so much worse than staring down the bore of an enemy pistol? Apparently it was. When he wiped his palms on his trousers, he realized they were slick with sweat.

“Let's stick with calling you Cahetel. Why are you showing me these star charts, these maps of time?”

That you may enter a correct plea. You now speak for the human race, including biological and formal systems, Angels, Archangels, and Potentates, up through your Power housed in your innermost planet.

“Innermost? Jupiter is the fifth planet, not the first.”

The smaller, rocky bodies of the inner system are no longer significant. Do you have sufficient to plead with us? What you say determines the outcome for your race and its generations.

“Sufficient what? Sufficient information, you mean?”

Montrose now realized why he was so frightened. One wrong phrase, one wrong word, and he lost everything.

He would lose his life and his world and their future.

He would lose Rania.

Montrose dearly wished his bigger, smarter self, the titanic body holding the calculation power of the Selene mind occupying the core of the moon, were here to advise him. His dim and flattened memories of what his larger self had meant to do, what he had understood about the universe, were like a dream that evaporates on waking. He wondered if men in the old days who suffered grievous head injuries, and forgot how to read and write, or senile grandfathers reduced to the thinking level of small children knew what this was like.

“No one appointed me to speak for the human race.”

You form a strange attractor within the cliometric system, therefore we elect you.

He had no response for that.

The creature spoke again, this time in a demanding tone of voice:
Do you know sufficient facts of the general situation in which your race finds itself to determine how best to serve the Hyades?

“Why the hell should we serve the Hyades?” It burst out of him before he knew what he said.

The tendrils reaching down from the eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth of the creature now waved and writhed like the arms of a squid, standing out in each direction. It looked like a hand reaching through the mouth of a mask suddenly opening its fingers.

But it was not a threatening gesture. The ropes and twigs of murk material dripping from the face of the black skull were pointing; a first group at the screens, a second group at the dome, or at the deck. Montrose knew from his internal star atlases that each in this second group of tendrils were pointing at one or another of the areas of space the screens represented: Coma Berenices, Pleiades, Ptolemy's Cluster, the Cone Nebula, Xi Persei, and Orion Nebula.

Then he noticed each tendril in the second group was twisted or flexed in such a way to make it complementary to an oppositely twisted tendril in the first. They were paired up: one tendril pointed at the screen showing M34, and its mate was pointed downward at the position where (had the bulk of Sedna not been in the way) the constellation Perseus turned.

He opened his mouth to ask the creature why it made itself so damn hard to understand? Cahetel obviously could make itself more human at will, able to talk more clearly. Why all this dropping hints?

Montrose snapped his mouth shut without speaking. He was not as smart as Big Montrose, but he still enjoyed a many-leveled mind of posthuman efficiency, rapid as lightning and clear as crystal. He did not need to ask what the many parallel thought-structures in his mind could see for him using their method of rapid sequential intuition.

The resources absorbed by dialog with any man would be charged against Man's racial indenture. Brevity was more efficient.

It was the same reason why Cahetel had come toward Sol taking leisurely millennia rather than a century and a half. Cahetel was saving Sol money.

“We've been enslaved by the cosmic misers!” Montrose thought savagely to himself. “They are charging us by the syphilitic
word
!”

And they might be charging by the second. That was not a comforting thought.

He looked carefully again at the screens and related cliometric information. It was a detailed map of the Orion Arm out to two light-millennia, and a map of future history out to
A
.
D
. One Million, the end of the current Epoch.

“You cannot spare any resources, can you? Why? Why are you so poxing poor?”

With a stab of clarity akin to terror, he remembered how hard and cruel his mother and his older relatives all had made themselves to be, during the Starvation Years, back when he was young. Poor folk could be generous with each other, but not with strangers, or livestock.

He remembered the savage efficiency his mother used wringing a neck of a chicken, nasty, smelly birds whom she tried so desperately to keep alive long enough to sell. If the chickens could talk, any dialog between Ma and some bedraggled, proud cock with a plan for saving more chicks would no doubt have been much like this talk with Cahetel.

“Why are you poor? What is happening?”

We detect an error in the memories of Menelaus Montrose. The other Dominations in service to Praesepe are not allies to Hyades. We are not displaying the locations and extrapolations of fellow servants pursuing a mutual long-term gain.

“They are your enemies.”

The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

Montrose wondered if it spent fewer resources to repeat a statement than to formulate a new one. Then he realized this was not a threat from Cahetel toward Sol. Cahetel was speaking of a threat to Hyades, its master.

“Hold up. What the hell? You mean—you are in a contest to colonize planets. I get that. Whoever spreads the most races to the most worlds wins. The losers get—what happens to them? I don't get that. Praesepe kills them?”

Silence. Apparently the miserliness of the creature with its words extended even to an unwillingness to confirm the obvious.

Montrose looked again at the cliometric information. The Domination at the Pleiades, according to the figures and diagrams, had been downgraded, and was in the process of being dismantled. Liquidated. He could not tell from the code notations whether this meant screaming and weeping millions of some sort of big-headed fish people were being fed into abattoirs, or if it meant gigantic machines in orbit being reduced in energy intake and lowering their intelligence by an order of magnitude.

Montrose reflected that, by the standards of the world when he was a child, he himself, in this current body with his brain made of logic diamond, was an artificial being, at least a cyborg; and the death of his giant central self, and the sudden jar of senile stupidity, was exactly the kind of lowering of intellectual resources he had just been imagining. So it was either death camps or it was planetwide senility, a voluntary act of self-lobotomy. He was not sure which was worse.

He looked more closely at the information.

Hyades was lagging far behind Xi Persei in the number and rate of planets colonized. But the measure was not merely the amount of new planetary oceans to be filled with organisms from mother worlds. It was a matter of stellar-scale engineering.

Hyades, albeit behind in colonization, was devoting more effort to building ringworlds and metallic clouds and Dyson spheres and hemispheres and other macroscale structures Montrose could put no name to, engineering projects that looked like balls of string loosely wound around stars.

“You want to turn all the inanimate matter in this arm of the galaxy into thinking machinery. Why?”

To think.

Montrose wondered if he imagined the hint of sarcasm in the creature's voice.