At the same time the two statues, the red and the black, now stepped to either side of where panels cunningly hidden in the walls slid aside, showing a long corridor whose many glass doors, one after another, held partial pressurization airlocks. Unlike true airlocks, these were used in emergencies, as each cell lessened the air pressure slightly as the runners passed through from one to the next, in the hopes that the biomodifications of seasoned spacefarers, or medical attention aboard ship, could reverse the damage of the bends. Such partial locks were used only when time was short.
It was not a subtle hint.
6
Pantropy and Terraformation
1. Visions of Greater Heavens
Their launch window allowed a rendezvous with the NTL Emancipation, but the aspect was unfavorable, and the transit long. From the surface of the moon, it was one hundred sixty hours, nearly a month, before they achieved the high, translunar orbit occupied by their mighty ship.
As before, Montrose spied on Del Azarchel’s stargazing. Whether it was serious research or idle pastime, he could not tell. Unlike before, Del Azarchel’s data path went through the communication laser, to the Emancipation, to the elaborate astronomy houses fore and amidships there, which used the immense vastness of the sails to gather starlight from the edge of the universe, and then to the ship’s ratiotech core for analysis, which was carried back to Blackie on return signal.
Ten thousand lightyears from Earth, he saw the turbulence in the Great Nebula in Carina the Keel, where powerful radiation and strong interstellar winds from a phalanx of massive and hypermassive stars were creating havoc in the storms of gas and dust. Here were young stars, each in its vortex like the eye of a hurricane, drawing in the cloudy matter and screaming out their radio noise, newborns uttering their first cries.
For the first time, Montrose suspected he glimpsed what Del Azarchel sought. The motions of these clouds exhibited the same patterns of slow expansions and contractions which he had previously seen in the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Great Nebula material was consuming the fogbanks of faint interstellar material issuing from its neighbors. What did the patterns represent?
Now the eyes of Del Azarchel turned toward views some thirteen million lightyears away, far across the intergalactic night. Here a giant elliptical galaxy in Centaurus, NGC 5128, was colliding with its spiral neighbor and absorbing it. Countless stars were being born in the violence. Jets and lobes of X-ray and radio emission issued far out into the intergalactic void from the highly active core of the merging galaxy, where a supermassive black hole burned at its heart.
Montrose forgot Del Azarchel, over whose shoulder he looked, fascinated at the crash and crescendo of cosmic violence. He goggled at the vision of the colliding spiral galaxy pair NGC 3808A and B like bright whirlpools of fire unwinding each other. He gaped at the burning nebula of Arp 81, remnant of a pair of spiral galaxies which had collided one hundred million years ago. He stared at the Mice Galaxies NGC 4676 and Arp 242, connected by a tidal bridge of stars, but leaving long tidal tails of wandering stars far behind them as they merged. He gasped at Mayall’s Object, and he saw the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 with its relativistic jet.
But the most astonishing and violent sight he saw was the object called ESO 593-IG 008: it was the fusion of two massive spiral galaxies and a third irregular galaxy in an astonishing triple collision.
Montrose saw Seyfert galaxies shooting vast jets of matter into the intergalactic night at half lightspeed or more; and he saw interacting pairs of ring galaxies, and saw oddly shaped three-armed spirals and one-armed spirals and galaxies with detached segments and companions no science of astronomy as yet had explained. They seemed somehow like battle-scarred veterans to him, maimed and halt.
The disembodied and posthuman intellect of Menelaus Montrose, his frozen form free of physical distractions and his senses bathed in data streams issuing from instruments far more potent than human eyes, soon became lost among the wonder of the stars.
Farther he looked, and further he reached, eager for wonders, drunk on starlight.
The galaxies were grouped in clusters, and the clusters into superclusters. And there were things larger than superclusters: the gravitationally bound galaxies formed complexes of massive, thread-like structures fifty to eighty megaparsecs long: filaments of galaxies, Great Walls of galaxies. And the vast, empty spaces tens and hundred of megaparsecs wide, where no walls of superclusters reached, and no cluster ventured, and only a few isolated sparks of galaxies floated like lost embers, were the Great Voids.
He drew his eyes and instruments closer to home, and noted, not without wonder, the relative motion of the Andromeda Galaxy, closest large neighbor to the Milky Way. The two galaxies were on a collision course, and would merge in less than three billion years.
Montrose was so absorbed that it came as a shock to him when a message, smuggled by Del Azarchel backward through the repeater Montrose had been using to spy on him, emitted a low chuckle, and formed a message.
Well, Cowhand, would you care to check my work? I have been waiting patiently for you to volunteer. Surely you care about the result?
2. Madness Among the Stars
Montrose sent back a noncommittal reply, the electronic equivalent of a grunt. He was too proud to admit that after so long a period of observation, he had not figured out what Del Azarchel was seeking.
Del Azarchel no doubt guessed his thought. He opened a voice channel and sent wryly, “Come, is this also not clear to you? Must I spell out everything? The Monument Mathematics contains the skeleton of a Universal Grammar, a philosophical language which translates all possible forms of encoding thought into all other forms. I have been looking at the natural astronomical phenomena as if they contained encoded messages written by an alien intelligence. I have been examining the patterns in the stars.”
Montrose responded with voice signals. It was easier than sending text or Monument code, and he could add a nonchalant note to show how little he cared. “Blackie, if you think the stars spell out a message just for you, that you can read with your secret decoder ring, I think it is time to check your skull for divarication errors.…”
“Or check the stars. Check variations in the motions of stars, nebula, and gas clouds, their growth and decay rates, the periods when stars go nova, everything. When I analyze it by Monument algorithms, a certain pattern emerges.”
“A linguistic pattern?”
“The language of nature. As I said, physics is merely a metaphorical means of speaking that unmelodic music we call speech, whose metaphors are very precise and crisp and colorless. I have been reading the scroll of nature, hearing the voice of creation.”
“And what did you find?”
“I found the voice was out of tune. Nothing exactly matches the Monument’s given model of how the clockwork universe should be working. Some stars are out of place. Some are too dim. Many galaxies are not in the locations they should be if gravity were a constant and operated by the rules of Einstein. There is something changing the stars.”
“What kind of change?’
“Activity. Energy expenditures. Collisions. Something is reaching between the galaxies and creating similar patterns of stars going dark, or going nova. There are too many Population I stars, young stars of heavy elements, and too few Population III stars, older stars of low metallic content. There are too many planets, more than can be accounted for. The streams of dust and nebulae are disturbed. It is as if … almost as if…”