Nor did the ghosts disagree. The cliometric calculus of their many environmental xypotechs showed that the world of Splendids would suffer environmental decay and dropping population rates across the millennia, unless a mass of people as large as the original forced migration was gathered here by the Twenty-fifth Millennium. If not, the world would fall below the minimal population numbers needed to maintain the atmospheric towers and oceanic infusion wells, causing environmental degradation and a return to the original atmospheric balance of gases, and causing death of the entire (and entirely artificial) Earth-like biosphere.
And the cold-eyed Swans of Delta Pavonis in their white-winged robes would emerge from their icy coffins in the wastelands, never smiling once, and live their lives of isolation, under once-more native skies filled with smokes and dripping airborne jellyfish equally poisonous to man, meeting only to mate, and building no tools, neither interstellar ships nor interstellar radios.
For many years Del Azarchel dwelt on the cold world of Splendor, for the planet lacked the energy richness needed to return him home. Then a worldwide war broke out, a grim absurdity on a world so desperately void and empty. Del Azarchel, aiding and betraying the ferocious warlords one after another, used his ship’s sails as orbital mirrors to melt and crack the glaciers where various armies hid, or sink the icebergs used as barges by their navies, or used his ship’s position to deflect meteors toward defenseless towns, until he was in able to decree himself supreme leader, nobilissimus and lord. When he commanded the cowering civilization to gather the resources needed to exile him back to Sol, gladly they obeyed.
The Emancipation towed the launching laser beyond their cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Tailfeather, the outermost planet of Delta Pavonis. The lonely laser lighthouse was manned by Swans and thinking machines with no loyalty to the Splendids, and by some miracle the laser beam did not fail during an entire decade of terawatt output.
Del Azarchel mounted no further expeditions to Delta Pavonis. The chances that the Swans, or, if not they, whosever unwise hands it might be that the transplutonian lighthouse of Delta Pavonis fell into next, would not turn the apocalyptically powerful laser against the planet Splendid, were very slim. Del Azarchel did not expect the colony to survive, and Montrose (for Del Azarchel after his return shared all his finding with him) expected no better.
There were no other destinations from which any radio messages returned, and so no other expeditions from Sol were launched.
All the other colonies from Proxima to 82 Eridani were dead, twisted half-human bodies of failed pantropic experiments unburied under atmospheres never quite terraformed to a proper breathable mix. Montrose heard the last words of the last survivors on the radio, at least of those colonists who had the wealth and will to build interstellar-range radio lasers.
Montrose lost interest in a lot of things, after that. The interstellar human civilization which was needed for Rania’s return was stillborn.
8. The Endarkening
A.D. 14600 TO 14990
After the interstellar radio silence fell, and nothing more was heard from Splendor of Delta Pavonis nor from Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani, Montrose augmented himself up to the level of Selene. The sudden clarity was blinding. All too clearly, he saw what was happening on Tellus: Mass ignorance spread as biological man became ever more dependent on his talking tools and talking beasts. Electronic man became ever more dependent on applications and appliances from higher up the mental ladder, from the servants of Jupiter. Some of the Ghosts Montrose met were illiterate. They were computers which could not add and subtract. Factions spreading an anti-intellectual cult—no one wanted to be like Jupiter—had won the day on three continents. Jupiter had already done everything, discovered everything, knew everyone, and knew how to run your life better than you did. There was not much point to anything.
Montrose, no matter how often he redid the calculations, found his cliometry showing that the human race in all its variations was going extinct, and the machines were being pushed by an evolutionary and economic pressure to ever fewer intellectual or self-aware functions.
For centuries, Montrose kept hoping stubbornly that he had made some error, overlooked some variable, or that Jupiter would somehow save mankind. But the time turned and turned again like a grindstone, and the cliometric slope bottomed out.
The knowledge that he had failed the task she had left him behind to do, that there would be no deceleration laser to stop Rania’s returning ship, and that, even had there been, no interstellar polity would exist to prove the human race were starfarers, eventually drove Montrose into self-imposed exile here.
But this mystery now followed him. The cliometry had never been wrong before. He had given up hope. Was there any cause for hope again?
9. Nonextinction Event
A.D. 22196
Montrose said, “Why ain’t the human race extinct? How did my cliometry go wrong?”
The biped mask said, “We ourselves are the historical vector you did not anticipate. Do you wish to recalculate your future history on the basis of minimal or no Swan influence on Firstling history?”
Montrose looked at the gold-coated creatures wryly. The beauty, the sheer physical grace of the Swans, was part of the reason for the human inferiority complex. That was not a factor with these ugly and wretched creatures. Montrose did not bring that up.
Just in his head, he could also see how the new factor of a race like this would play out. There were several mutually beneficial social interaction mechanisms Montrose could foresee. These creatures were servile enough that the crushing inferiority the Swans felt toward Tellus, or Tellus toward Jupiter, would not be a factor. The Firstling humans, from Sylphs to Melusine, would be inferior to these pathetic creatures only in certain respects, and only mildly. These Third Humans might as a whole be smarter than the First Humans, but the individuals lacked the shocking brilliance of the Swans. Ironically, the Thirds would act as an insulating layer protecting the Firsts from Jupiter.
Montrose spoke. “I don’t need no recalculation. I can see you are the product of a high-energy civilization. One that could not have come about on exhausted Earth. There is only one way that happened. Del Azarchel is the ‘Senior’ again because he found another Diamond Star, or some vast source of contraterrene. When was the ship launched?”
The biped said, “In a.d. 15077 we Myrmidons hollowed out the main belt planetoid 35 Leucothea, and affixed with lightsails and energy manipulation tackle, and coated the surface with picotechnological armor called argent, allowing the entire surface to enjoy the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force. This White Ship mass is roughly equal to the moon of Saturn, Hyperion, and the energy aura she can generate allows her to tow a mass far in excess of her own.”
“I know her destination was the M17, the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, five thousand lightyears away. Which star?”
The wheel said, “Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star.”
A helpful almanac stored in one of his brains helpfully provided that Kleinmann 1973 was a binary of two O-type stars, highly energetic short-lived stars of sixty solar masses, the center of an odd double-shelled nebula formation, and the source of immense X-ray vents.
Montrose, studying the astronomical data in this file concerning the odd pattern of energy discharges, was thunderstruck. It had been staring him in the face all the time, sitting here in an unexplored corner of his encyclopedia of memories. One of the two O-type stars in Kleinmann’s binary was made of positive matter. The other was obviously antimatter, for the inner shell of the nebula had been hollowed out by antimatter particles carried on the solar wind from the negative star, which, encountering the central mass of the nebula cloud, converted it to pure photonic energy, which, in turn blew the outer shell beyond the dangerous range of the negative star. Nothing else could account for the weird geometry of this hollow cloud of stardust.