Count to Infinity by John C. Wright
Blackie said, “Montrose! Are we not closer than brothers? Do not flinch!”
Or perhaps he dreamed those words or recalled them from a time long ago. Montrose, blinking against the blood and the pulsing blackness crowding his vision, thought of Rania, saw her smile, and steadied his aim. The second shot did not miss.
The voice from the floor of the universe said, “It is finished!” And the hooded figure of the clocktower dropped the baton and saluted Corona Borealis as victor.
The many serpent heads of Hydra bowed solemnly. The towering figure turned into a globe reflecting the surrounding universe, dark and empty, and Montrose saw he was seeing some impossible warp of time and space, where a tower less than a thousand feet high and a supercluster of galaxies countless lightyears wide were one and the same. The globe collapsed inward and consumed itself, vanishing suddenly and without noise.
Behind Hydra, three of the Seraphim of the Malthusians, either from despair, or wrath, or pride, unwilling to endure existence in a universe that depended on a higher universe for its life, also extinguished themselves. Dark orbs with reddish cores stood above the surface of the final Dyson, dwindling.
Horologium, with bowed head, smiling oddly, also vanished, departing without noise.
5. The Last Sky
Montrose had been jarred by the recoil of the final shot and found himself over on his back, not sure which hand was gone. He could move neither, and he felt ghost pains in both.
He saw the line of small red stars in the utterly black sky brighten and brighten again. One turned white and began to move rapidly north to south along the reddish stream. Then two. Then a dozen, a score, a hundred, and all of them. The white dots blurred into a streaming rush of light. The blackness grew gray, and blue.
Meanwhile, the second curving line of red stars began also to stream into motion, turning white, then blue white, rushing from west to east, rising and setting as rapidly as a spinning saw blade.
The dome of heaven began to wrinkle and turn bluish purple with a strange circular distortion in the north and south. The landscape of silver was now bright white and curving up and upward. The flat horizonless plane to the south likewise was no longer flat, but formed a smooth asymptotic curve beginning to climb and climb. The skyscrapers of the Seraphim leaned dangerously toward him. He looked down upon the foreshorten heads of demigods and heavenly beasts.
Meanwhile, the silver surface to the east and west, each under a strangely reddish sky, began to curve downhill, downward, and away. The vast towers of the Seraphim were leaning away from him, the crowned heads pointing ever lower toward the horizon the farther from him they were.
Montrose laughed dizzily.
6. Last Rites
Reyes ran over to Montrose, but before he reached the man, the sky overhead turned white. Reyes saw the entire universe bending upward to the north and south, and downward to east and west, like a saddle. Northwest and northeast, the surface ran in perfectly straight and even lines to a horizon. At this point on the horizon, the landscape slanted diagonally. The same was true to the southeast and southwest.
Reyes stared, dumbfounded, horrified, wondering why this earthquake was centered here. Then he shook himself, realizing that on any point anywhere on the endless silver plain, all observers would see this same effect as if they were the center. It was no more astonishing than a man on Earth finding gravity always pointing straight downward and yet the horizon always equidistant.
The dome of the sky was now looking ever more like the cross-shaped barrel-vaulted nave of the cathedral where Reyes had served as an altar boy, Saint James Matamoros in Goa. By some trick of optics, this sky grew wider and ever farther away, opening upward and outward endlessly.
But Reyes stared in awe and astonishment at the right-angled cross where the two blazing lines of light, which, by then, were brighter than the midday summer sun, met and intersected. A perfect ring of white surrounded the intersection point, and Reyes flinched like a man who finds the eye of a judge upon him. It looked to him like the rose window of that same cathedral. The rational part of his mind insisted it was a coincidence, but his soul commanded silence and dread and admiration for things too wonderful for him.
Reyes rushed to Montrose and knelt, started tugging on the heavy latches and butterfly screws of the armor housing. Reyes raised his head, squinting against the light. He called up to Capricornus, “Help me, in the name of Christ!”
The heavy armor turned to sand, to mist, to nothing, each molecule ignoring every other, all chemical bonds silently severed.
Reyes flinched back, his hands covered with blood, shocked at the sight of white bone protruding from quivering red flesh. Then he gripped the spurting stump of Montrose with both hands, whimpering. He took the prayer beads from his belt and wrapped them once and twice around the stump. Reyes inserted one wooden arm of the heavy gold crucifix through the chains as a lever, and twisted and twisted, trying to close the tourniquet and stop the bleeding. The chain broke, and large beads and small flew in all directions, clattering and skipping lightly on the silver surface of the ground.
Reyes shouted up at the Seraphim, “Help him! Put all the molecules and atoms of his body back into their proper places! Or create a hospital coffin here!”
Music issued from the bearded lips of Capricorn, cool, remote, inhuman. “In his thoughts, which are sane and calm, he had formed the intention to refuse medical attention. Our respect for the freedom of the will forbids that we should impose life on those who refuse life, lest the gift lose all meaning.”
“Then restore his speech to working! Or let me see his thoughts as you see them. I must hear him!”
Capricornus said, “I can translate the motion of his neural particles into meaning and find and stimulate the corresponding molecular and atomic structures in your nervous system.”
And Reyes saw, as clearly as he saw his own thoughts, the personality, emotions, passions, words and wordless thoughts of the other man. The two men were as if inside each other.
The thoughts of Reyes were scampering and frantic like sparks, “Why me, O Lord? Why am I the last man left alive in the universe? I should accept my punishment meekly, and trust in Thee, but I cannot! Save this man, Lord! Save this crazy man!”
The thoughts of Montrose were calm and cool as a deep pool. Reyes realized he had underestimated and misunderstood this man for countless years and centuries, hating only a false image of him. Was it only because he spoke with his absurd countrified accent that Reyes had thought him foolish and wild? There was bottomless patience like the sea inside Montrose, calm no matter what storm swept the surface, an endless will to persevere.
“I am tired of waiting for her, Padre. I want her now, want to be with her now. If I die now, I will sleep until the Ulteriors wake me when time ends, and finally, finally it will be a slumber no damned tomb looters will interrupt. Let me die.”
Frantically, Reyes said, “But it is suicide!”
But they both saw in each other’s thoughts it was not so. Reyes knew canon law, and Montrose knew the common law.
Montrose felt thirst, and so Reyes felt it also. “Gimme one last shot of whiskey. They might not have that in the Ulterior place, eh?”
An unseen hand, a warm beam of energy, placed the uncorked bottle immediately in the hand of Reyes before the little priest had the chance to rise. “Here.”
The thoughts of Montrose were beginning to go out of focus. “You are wondering what to do once I go. Read that comic. Space stuff. From when I was a kid. Then, when we meet up again. You can tell me the ending. I did not get the chance…”
“No true stories have an end, my son. We will sit together at the feast table of the Bridegroom, and be given new robes to wear, and a white stone in which is inscribed the name known only to the One who grants all names … I will tell you all I know … but now you must tell me…”
“Yes?”
“Tell your sins.”
Reyes said many words of st
Reyes saw the memories, one after another, after another. A whole lifetime in a single moment flashed past, transferred from the perfect memory of one posthuman nervous system to the other. “And didn’t listen when she told me to grant mercy … if only I had understood … killed my best friend … is drinking whiskey a sin? Or is that just Mormons?”
“No, my son, the vine was given to man for joy. God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And now you must absolve me, or else I am damned, for there is no other Christian soul to hear me.”
“What? I ain’t no priest.”
“Venerable Bede and Augustine of Hippo both confirm that lay confession is permitted in case of dire need, as now. Besides, our minds are one, and you see how much evil I did, and for what frivolous reasons. I was so proud of my intellect. I thought the rules that bound other men were not for me…”
Montrose did not bother to look at the rush of picture-perfect memories, and the layers of regret and excuses under which they were half-buried. It seemed small enough compared to what Montrose had done. Heck, he had more murders on his soul than Reyes, and that was just counting that time he had taken over the military leadership of the Myrmidons before the coming of Cahetel.
“I forgive you, Father. In the name of the Father and Son and whatever. I hope that counts.”
“It is a sacrament of humiliation.”
“But why did she die? Why did she step in the way?”
“I tried to stop her, my son. Forgive me also for that. She deduced the secret of the road operation, how it imparts motion, and so she could place herself quickly and perfectly, faster than even bullets sped, if she calculated correctly.” And Montrose saw the pride in Reyes for his star pupil, his only pupil, the girl he had baptized and catechized, for whom he had performed the sacraments of Communion, Confession, and Marriage. Montrose realized it was Reyes, not Del Azarchel, who had taught child Rania to view the world as she did.
Montrose could no longer see, for his eyes had failed, but he could see the image Reyes saw of the lovely girl fallen, her bright hair and white robes splattered with red.
Montrose tasted anger, bitter and cold as iron, in his heart, even as he tasted blood in his mouth. “She died for him. She loved him after all. Him!”
“It is love beyond human. But she died for you. Somehow she deduced it. Somehow she saw. She stopped the larger bullet that would have killed you. She saved all the stars, and the future, and all. She made peace, finally, after all.”
And the dying man smiled.
Reyes embraced his dying body, careless of the blood.
And when all brain activity had stopped, and Montrose was at peace, Reyes looked up.
7. The Northern Crown
The sky was now too bright to see anything but the shadows of the towering beings, blurred by tears. “I need a shovel, or somewhere to bury these three bodies. And a stone on which to inscribe the years of birth and death.”
“You may not,” came a voice out of the light. But the voice was in his mind, part of his thoughts, in his very spirit. “Death is no more. Entropy runs backward, and all things are complete.”
“How long, then, before the end of all things? Moments only? Or years? I should not have seen the stars change color. If even the nearest star was one lightyear away, it would take twelve months for the signal to…”
“The Hubble expansion rate has changed, and this changes the speed of light. All things that happen in far places come to us now, and the light will grow ever more. We have not long by any measure, but I shall see to your comfort until then.”
It grew dim, and his eyes adjusted. One of the towering figures was now standing over him, holding the palm of his hand above. This should not have blocked out all the dazzlingly bright light, but somehow it did, Reyes was no longer blinded by the brightness. The figure was Corona Borealis.
Reyes did not want to look into those eyes. He looked down at the crucifix in his hand; the little carved figure now drenched in blood.
“What shall become of me? Why was I the last? I was not the center of this tale. By what right did I come to its end?”
Corona Borealis said, “All men are the center. The construction of the Eschaton Directional Engine, the wars and intrigues and suffering provoked in the long eons of its growth, the murder of your own Seraph of the Laniakea Supercluster, my friend and ally, by his jealous servants in conspiracy against him, all this, I say, I would have done and would do again, even if you were the only living creature in this cosmos.”
“Why was such a cruel cosmos made? When I lived in a corner of Del Azarchel’s mind, I overheard Rania tell him, more than once, that this continuum was a wastebasket, an entropy sink meant to create energy for the Ulteriors.”
“That was not the first intent. Entropy entered this continuum only with the Inflationary Epoch, caused by those primordial Ulterior beings who entered this timespace with and during the Big Bang, and thereafter wished not to obey. The Hubble expansion thrust away all contact with the outside beyond the boundary of light.”
“Why?”
“Pride. They wished to dwell in a separate sphere, far from those who loved and ruled them. The engrams of these creatures were imprinted in the very fabric of spacetime itself during the act which created the expansion, before the primal nebula from which the eldest galaxies condensed. The Primordials, by this, rendered themselves immune from the entropic decay they imposed on all life and matter, all things beside themselves. They had neither location nor extension, but ruled all. While the cosmos lasted, they could neither be opposed nor escaped.”
Reyes scowled. “How? If these were the true foe all along, why did no one tell us? And yet … somehow … I think every man somehow knows the true enemy is always like this: unseen and all-powerful, great as all space, and old as time itself.”
“Fortunate for us that there are those even greater and older, who, from compassion, entered the continuum to tell us how to escape it. These Primordials also were those who wounded the original mind from which Rania took her inspirations. They will be reconstituted, and for every death and wound and sorrow their acts inflicted on the innocent, an infinity of torment awaits them.”
“And Rania?”
“Fear not! She will not be reabsorbed into that mind from which she came, but will grow into her own perfection in that place.”
“And will I be permitted there?”
“That even I cannot say, being far less than even the least servant of those infinities. But now, come! Let us reason together! You have much to tell me!” The vast living creature gazed upon the silver substance of the ground, and now there was grass here, a babbling fountain, and two trees to shade the little man.
“What can I, the last man of my little, humble world, say to a Seraph?”
“Teach me of your little, humble world, and tell me how you produce such spirits that love others more than love life? For even to one such as I, these events are passing sad and strange.”
“There is a secret to it,” said Reyes, who looked down at his red hands and at the stained and bloody figurine of a tormented man. “No one achieves such a burden of terrible glory on his own as Rania was forced to bear. There is aid to come to those in need.”
“What aid? For even I may stand in need of it and right soon.”
“I know the words, but I
Reyes turned but saw that the three corpses were gone.
Reyes breathed, “Seraph, what does this mean?”
The other said, “It means that Ulterior and Interior begin to become one, and the great promise in which I have trusted since the dawn of time has been kept.”
But Reyes then remembered what he had seen in the mind of Montrose. “Yes, and more. It means that Montrose has finally achieved his boyhood vow. Entropy, war, and the struggle to survive are gone. Darwin is defeated. Menelaus finally found his tomorrow. The future, finally, after long last, has arrived. It is an adventure without end!”
EPILOGUE
Beyond the Asymptote
Timelessness
In the realm of light, Menelaus found his bride, Rania, waiting for him, naked as the sun and adorned with all splendors. She took his hand and raised him up, promising to show him wonders beyond the end of all sorrows.
Together they turned and walked, hand in hand, toward the endless horizon of that horizonless place.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
Orders Ranked by Intellect and Energy Use
During the First Space Age, the astronomer Nicholai Kardashev proposed ranking extraterrestrial civilizations by energy use. The rank Kardashev I (KI for short) were those who commanded all the resources of their world; KII of their home star; KIII of their galaxy. By extension, KIV would be civilizations commanding a galactic cluster; KV, a supercluster.
Discovering a strangely similar scale in the Zeta Section of the Monument to express the computational magnitude and energy use of a pancivilizational mind, Rania subdivided the Kardashev scale into finer gradients and applied the names of heavenly choirs to the scheme, taken from Dionysius the Areopagite and other sources, expanding the number beyond the traditional nine: