The Architect of Aeons

Book 4: The Eschaton Sequence

by John C. Wright

Genres: Space Opera; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The epic and mind-blowing finale to this visionary space opera series surpasses all expectation: Menelaus Montrose, having forged an uneasy alliance with his immortal adversary, Ximen del Azarchel, maps a future on a scale beyond anything previously imagined. No longer concerned with the course of history across mere millennia, Montrose and del Azarchel have become the architects of aeons, bringing forth minds the size of planets as they steer the bizarre intellectual descendants of an extinct humanity.

Ever driving their labors and their enmity is the hope of reunion with their shared lost love, the posthuman Rania, whose eventual return is by no means assured, but who may unravel everything these eternal rivals have sought to achieve.

John C. Wright's The Architect of Aeons is the latest in his millennia spanning space opera.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 21, 2015

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

A Lost World



A.D. 11049

1. Ghost Ship

The Earth was gone.

"Damnification and pestilential pustules. You'd better be dead wrong on your dead reckoning, Blackie."

The nigh-to-lightspeed starship Emancipation hung in space in the spot where Tellus, the home of man, was in theory supposed to be. Sol hovered to one side, an endless roar of radio white noise and high-energy particles.

"Restrain your ire, my dear smelly Cowhand. With the navigation beacons wiped out, our precise position is hard to determine. But the sun is at the correct size and distance, and the other planets also. This is where Earth should be."

"Blackie! You think the enemy done her in?"

As a ship, the Emancipation was a titaness: one hundred thousand metric tons displacement, her overall length twice that of a skyscraper's height from the First Space Age, with a sail spread of five hundred miles, requiring seventy-five thousand terawatts of laser energy to propel. With her sails folded, she looked like the skeleton of an umbrella with absurdly long and spindly arms, or perhaps like some microscopic marine animal. She had been designed for a complement of four hundred and eighty fully human persons, a complement of twenty posthuman Melusine, whose cetacean members would occupy the fore cistern, and an additional complement of twenty packs of subhuman dog-things, who would occupy kennels and factory volumes amidships. But the miles of conduits and inflatable tunnels connecting the fore ramscoop array with the long spine of the aft drive shaft, the rotating living quarters and nonrotating slumber quarters, the workhouses, shroud houses, laboratories, mind-core and launch collar (where an arsenal of pinnaces, probes, landers, missiles, and robotools where docked) were empty. The vast ship was a floating ghost town.

Like an arrow, even when at rest, the shape of the star-vessel suggested flight, as if she yearned to soar. Newtonian space and time was not suited to her lines: the paradoxes of Einstein were in her, implied by the heavy armor, the drag-reducing streamlines.

Neither ramscoop nor drivespine had ever once been heated up to form the ship's vast magnetic funnels fore and aft, nor had her polymer sails, brightest mirrors of weightless gossamer, ever been run out to their full multimile-wide diameter. Despite her name, the nigh-to-lightspeed vessel had never achieved near-lightspeed, nor even left the Solar System.

"Cowhand, whatever do you mean by 'done her in'?"

"Blackie, I mean beefed her!"

The ship had two crewmen, or three, depending on how one counted. The two humans (or technically, incarnate posthumans) aboard were Menelaus Illation Montrose, who had once been the Judge of Ages before his abdication, and Ximen del Azarchel, who had once been the Master of the World before his exile. They were the best of friends and deadliest of foes, as well as being the only members of their subspecies, homo sapiens posthominid, called Elders or Early Posthumans, and both in love with the same long-lost girl, the Princess Rania of Monaco, and both unwilling, during this particular protracted interval of time, to take up weapons and murder each other as they both so dearly wished to do. Each one was, in his own way, a very lonely man.

"Beef what? That is hardly more clear."

"Blackie, don't you speak proper Texan? I mean, d'you reckon the Varmint destroyed the Earth?"

At the moment, both men had their bodies safely tucked away in biosuspension coffins, with four quarts of submicroscopic fluid machinery occupying all the major cells and cell clusters in their corpses. Whether the bodies were alive or dead was a matter of semantic nicety. The nanomachinery slowed the biological processes to a rate indistinguishable from stasis, except that at the moment enough of their neural tissue was at an activity level to house their consciousnesses. The coffins were clinging by their crablike legs to surfaces that could be called bulkhead, or deck, or overhead (in zero gee the distinction is also a semantic nicety) of the forward storage locker used as the ship's bridge. Calling this the bridge was yet another semantic nicety, since the control interfaces and guidance systems could be piped into any cabin in the ship where the pilot found himself, and several spots on the hull.

"As for that, my dear friend, I, ah, 'reckon' it to be unlikely."

"Issat so? Gimme your whys and wherefores, Blackie."

The third member of the crew (if it could be called that) was visible at the aft of the locker, filling the space where the entire wall (or bulkhead) had been removed, and reaching back along the ship's major axis some nine hundred yards. This third was a single monomolecular diamond, tinted amber due to nanotechnological impurities: lattices of fluorine-based chemicals like submicroscopic irregular camshafts were woven through the diamond matrix, and formed the basis of a rod-logic computation appliance wherein the ship's softbrain was housed. The crystal was semitranslucent, and shed some of its waste heat in the form of photons in the visible light spectrum, so a dull erubescent glow, like coals in a grate, filled the amber well of crystal with a smoky red gold.

"What we know of the Virtue-to use Rania's name for entities on the hyperpostsuperposthuman level of intellectual topography-comes from the inscription left behind on the Monument at V 886 Centauri, which, even after millennia, the human and posthuman civilizations of Earth cannot fully decipher. But that inscription hints that the Virtue of Hyades was coming here to rule and uplift the Earth, not destroy it."

"Yeah, well, looks like someone transposed an omicron for a zero or a doughnut or something, because I am looking at the spot where our mother planet, Earth, is supposedly s'pose to be, and I ain't seeing nothing but a whole lot of nothing."

"The Hyades are not the enemies of man, but our natural masters! They will guide us upward to evolutionary heights undreamed."

"Or blast us to atoms, if'n we ain't no damned use to them."

"You know nothing of them!"

"Nor you. Nor anyone, human or posthuman or whatthehell."

"I know no man shoots his own hounds."

"Unless the hound is a mad dog, mad enough to want to die free rather than live the slave of his so-called natural masters."

The reason for having this storage locker act as the bridge was that, with the aft bulkhead gone, there was no interface between either man and the ship's brain. Neither trusted that if the brain information were piped in through some indirect means, a control panel, a touchscreen or wand, that the other man might not bug or jinx the datastream. Both men were wary of the other, and both were gentlemen enough not to let the mutual hatred and suspicion rankle them. Little compromises made things easier: each man designed his own interface, and just sent a maser or laser into the depth of the crystal mind core at whatever arbitrary spot he chose. Neither man knew the one-inch-wide interface volume the other had claimed as his base of operations in the million-gallon multiton mass of seething thought-crystal.

Montrose observed, "On second thought, I am going to back off my Fried Earth theory. You'd think there'd be debris."

"What if they used contraterrene?" asked Del Azarchel. "The Virtue had the mass of Uranus. Enough to hold one earth-sized mass of antimatter."

"Hm. Total conversion would have made a flash we'd have seen while we was cowering like rats out at your old hidey-hole at Jupiter, Blackie."

Ximen del Azarchel, with a mental command, pointed a microwave laser at the input-output port on Montrose's coffin, and sent text with a parallel verbal channel for voice expression, and a wireframe for body language and facial expression. Del Azarchel sent a cartoon image of his lean, goatee'd, devilishly handsome face wearing a supercilious glance of doubt. "Jupiter was in conjunction, so Earth was 6.2 AU from us, masked by Sol."

Montrose sent back a shrug, a scowl on his bony, big-nosed, lanky, and lantern-jawed face. "The whole mass of Earth turning instantly to photons? We'd have seen the reflection from the other planets, Sol or no. Odds are you'd see it from Andromeda galaxy in two million years or so, something that bright. You want to check my figures?"

"No, Cowhand. Do you want to check mine?"

"Nope, I trust your math more than I trust opening an unshielded data channel. Do you think the Earth is hidden? Shielded somehow?"

Blackie put a thoughtful look on his cartoon face and sent that. "When we departed the Earth the first time, the human-cetacean group-mind had occupied the entire nickel-iron core of the planet, which you so thoughtfully turned into a gigantic logic crystal for them. They are what a man named Kardashev long ago called a level K-One race: a civilization that controlled the total energy and resources of a planet."

"What Rania called a Potentate." Montrose reminded himself with a mental frown what the scale and magnitude was of these monsters they faced. He knew that, by the Kardashev scale, a civilization controlling the whole output of a star was called K-Two, and of a galaxy, K-Three. The Hyades was between K-Two and K-Three, controlling the total output of matter and energy in a small star cluster, and an intelligence in the hundred billion range: what Rania called a Domination. In her scale, a civilization that totally exploited the mass and energy output of a gas giant was called a Power. The servant of the Hyades dispatched to Sol, large as a gas giant but much more finely organized, was called a Virtue, and was above K-One but below the K-Two level, controlling more mass-energy than a rocky planet but less than the total mass-energy of a star system.

Blackie was sending: "Like an ugly duckling finally reaching its own, the Earthly civilization was the first human race truly to supersede humanity. You saw how quickly the Swans reestablished the ancient weather control of the Sixtieth Century, how rapidly they converted the interior mass of the moon to logic diamond, and created the Selene Mind. It's been four hundred years since last we were allowed on Mother Earth but you saw the rate of development."

"I sure did."

"They were evolving from something at the edge of what we could comprehend to something beyond that edge. The growth rate was asymptotic."

"Always is, during a boom, Blackie."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean in real life, and not in daydreams, things got a natural growth rate until they run into a natural growth limit. Then the asymptote flips over: sure, advanced societies still advance, but always slower. Lookit how quick the fastest a man could go went from the speed of a sailing ship to the speed of a supersonic jet. And then in the decades after-what happened? Man did not keep getting faster and faster. Lookit how free mankind got during the Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution, and the abolition of slavery. And then what happened? Natural limits began to set in, and people didn't keep getting more free and more, they started losing their liberty by sips and dribbles in my country, and by gulps in yours. What makes you think intelligence growth doesn't have built in limits?"

"Merely because I know that an ape could not imagine a human. We are not discussing a merely linear increase in thinking speed, but a revolution in the quality of thought, the use of means beyond our imagination. Do you, ah, 'reckon' that the Swans, while we were absent, might have passed beyond an event horizon of asymptotic growth, and evolved beyond our reckoning?"

"And do what? Invent a technology that allows them to bend light around the entire globe?"

"Nothing so dramatic. Merely a layer of ash and dust brought up from the interior would lower the albedo. Let us never forget, just because we are dealing with entities that crossed one hundred and fifty-one lightyears to conquer us, that even something so small as a solar system is unimaginably vast, even for imaginations such as ours. If the Earth were not reflecting light, if we were out of estimated position by a few hundred thousand miles..."

"So where is Selene, the intelligent moon? Every crater and pothole was supposed to have a weapon inside. She was going to be the great offensive fortress, our rock of Gibraltar in the sky. The face of the moon lights up like a Christmas tree when she fires her main beam, and all the smoke from all the secondary launchers gets ionized in the hash. Where is she now?" Menelaus sent a sigh. "What if the ash and dust got kicked up not from the Potentate masking the Earth? Weapon damage would do the same."

"I don't believe it."

"You don't want to believe it, Blackie. Those Varmints are evil."

"The Virtue is meant to introduce us into the Galactic Civilization!"

"As serfs. Or all-meat patties. And if they was here to introduce us, where is they?"

"They who? You mean the Virtue?"

Not long ago, while orbiting Ganymede, the long-range telescopes of the Emancipation's astronomy house had captured an image of the intruder as it passed into the Solar System.

It had been a globular mass the size of a gas giant, adorned with silver clouds swirled into storm systems large enough to swallow smaller worlds. The clouds covered a liquid surface black as sin. They had seen the black mass drifting like a soap bubble toward the blue loveliness of Earth, moving with no visible means of propulsion. Fourteen immense machines or organisms that looked like trees in winter or naked umbrellas had been in orbit around it. These were the orbit-based space elevators or "skyhooks" whose blueprint had been seen on the surface of the Monument: the instruments used for deracinating whole populations of one planet to another. These skyhooks had had the decency to have reaction-drive engines, and move according Newtonian principles, even if the mother mass had not.

They had lost sight of the apparition as it passed toward the inner system.

Blackie said, "We are crippling ourselves by operating at less than optimal intelligence. Let us warm up the mind core to full self-awareness."

"It took me ten thousand years to figure out how to destroy Exarchel, your last fully self-aware supermachine, and that was when I had a supermachine of my own occupying the Earth's core helping me. No thanks. Next idea?"

Blackie said, "Let's take a year or two and look for occlusions. If a body passes before a star, we can find it."

Montrose said, "We can also keep an eye on any orbital anomalies. A mass the size of Uranus, if it is still in the system, might not mess up the fallpath of Jupiter too much, but we should be able to see its influence on the motions of the smaller planets, Mercury and Pluto. And let's deploy the sails a little bit, and gather in some light."

"Which may expose us to the Virtue, if the body is still in this system. With our sails open, we are visible to anyone with a medium-powered telescope."

"Let's risk it. I got two reasons. First, the aliens never approached any object smaller than a planet before. This ship is just a mayfly to them, and we're just specks."

"Hm. I seem to recall that even humans occasionally swat flies. What is your second reason?"

"We're both reckless and bored."

By unspoken mutual consent, both men lowered their subjective rate of passing time until they could see through the various instruments in the astronomy houses fore and amidships, or brought in through extravehicular remotes, the jeweled dots of the planets moving like waltzing dancers against the star-gemmed velvet of vacuum.

Intently they watched.

2. Visions of Great Worlds Afar

A.D. 11050

They created indentations in portions of the sail to use as convex mirrors and flexed the shrouds to turn them this way or that. These immense light-gathering fields were larger than any Earth-based telescope could be. It was like having a lens the size of the arctic ice cap.

Montrose soon noticed an anomaly in the drain of resources from the ship's astronomy house: the ship's brain was spending time poring over data peripheral to star occlusion scans. He was curious what Del Azarchel was seeking, and carefully, slowly, and secretly, he heterodyned a repeater signal on the incoming astronomical data.

The first quarter of the sky toward which Del Azarchel looked was the constellation Canes Venatici, toward the great extragalactic globular cluster at M3. Montrose with some effort beat back his rage at this act of voyeurism, so he did not thaw himself, take up the fire ax from the bulkhead, go to Del Azarchel's coffin, and chop his frozen face into bits. Yet Montrose was appalled that Del Azarchel would dare to stare, like an adulterous lover sighing and mooning at a married woman's window, at the stars which so called to Montrose and so recalled his wife to him.

But then Del Azarchel turned elsewhere those instruments more potent than any human eyes. Here in the constellation of Fornax the Furnace was a star called Hipparchos 13044, two thousand lightyears from Earth, whose waltz through the heavens betrayed the presence of a dark body, perhaps twice the size of Jupiter, orbiting it. But the star was one of many in a Helmi stream, originally belonging to a dwarf galaxy that had been devoured by the Milky Way nine billion years ago. The age of the planet was greater than that: it was from outside the galaxy. Montrose could not imagine what interest Del Azarchel could have in this astronomical anomaly.

Closer at hand, the wobble of the failed star HD 42176 in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, three hundred ninety lightyears away, betrayed a fire giant world, larger than Jupiter and closer to its primary than Mercury, orbiting once every thirty hours: a year short as a day.

It seemed Earth-like planets throughout the Local Interstellar Cloud were unusual. Jovian and superjovian worlds were much more common than smaller, rocky worlds. The current theory was that small planets were naturally swept up in the orbits of larger ones. In Sol's system, for reasons yet unknown, a primordial superplanet had been split into Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and this allowed inner and outer worlds, Mercury and Pluto, to form. Apparently life on Earth-sized worlds was a rare accident.

Montrose was puzzled. What was Del Azarchel's interest in exosolar planets?

Months passed.

3. Inconstant Earth

A.D. 11051

Both men exclaimed at the same time.

"Eureka!" and "Thar she blows me!"

"What did you find, you disgusting Texan clodpole?"

"I found where the Earth is hiding, though I cannot say how she got there. What'd you find, you dandified Iberian gutterbug?"

"I found out how she got there but not where she is. While looking for occlusions of any stars or background radiations by black bodies, the instruments picked up occlusions of various intervening energy fields. The magnetosphere of the sun is gravely disturbed. This disturbance is enough to grapple the core of the planet magnetically, and impart a lateral vector. I assume the initial acceleration was very mild, because even rocky planets are actually just gooey liquid with a little crust on the surface, and we do not see a trail of asteroids, ejecta, and debris trailing off. And it also shows the Earth was not removed entirely from the Solar System, since the solar magnetosphere does not extend so far, and, at accelerations low enough to keep the planet intact, could not have achieved solar escape velocity."

"Well, boy howdy, because I done found her. Venus has a slight drift to her orbit, and a wobble to her rotation, and so does Pluto-who did me good service this day, despite the men of old who said he weren't no planet."

"So where?"

"Up. The Earth is at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Earth is in a ball-o-twine orbit above the solar North Pole and below the South Pole."

"At the same distance as before?"

"So I guess. Simple orbital mechanics says it is easier to change your inclination than your speed or distance from the center of gravity. In this case, all they did-whoever they were-was increase the orbital inclination to ninety degrees. Boy, are all the astrologers going to be daffy after that stunt. As seen from Earth, the sun will swing through the same northern and south constellation once a year, but the zodiac of signs the sun passes through will be different each year, because the whole orbit is turning."

"So you have not actually found the Earth?"

"I know where we should concentrate our telescopes. One AU to the solar north, and one to the solar south. Because the whole orbit is turning like the rim of a spinning penny, we won't know from what direction Earth'll be approaching the solar North Pole. Could be up to six months before she passes through that area, and then however long it will take us to match orbits, three years or so. But to us at this speed, it will seem like no time...."

4. Less Oblate Spheroid

A.D. 11054

"... See? That weren't long," Menelaus concluded his sentence.

Now the world loomed large within the images the astronomy houses fore and amidships brought in. The moon looked nothing like the moon of old. Logic diamond had coated her seas and uplands, and now new craters of war damage had smashed and cracked the layers of diamond shell so that she resembled the fantastically shattered surface of Europa, rather than the silver-gray moon of Earth's past. Unthinkable energies had scalded strange and lurid colors into the blasted glass, green and gold and lines of crimson like bleeding scars, speckles of peacock blue scattered like pepper.

One crater so large that it by rights was a sea now occupied the lower quarter of the disk like an eye, and the mountains cast up in the center were a beady pupil. It overtopped the exact spot Tycho Crater once had occupied, as if some base or fortress there had been obliterated with a six-mile-wide meteor, or some other weapon yielding a ninety-teraton blast. Tiny ring arcs of dust and gravel orbited the moon, perhaps residue from the blast.

Menelaus was shocked-nay, offended-that the ancient body and the mysterious seas which had haunted so many love songs and images of his youth were now forever gone.

"It's ... it's rotating," he told Del Azarchel, unable to heterodyne into any tone of voice the infinite sense of loss and rage he felt. The globe would now turn its dark side once every two weeks toward her primary.

Del Azarchel was also enraged. "The print of my hand is gone. Look here, instead. This."

In the vast crater that covered a quarter of the surface were the angles and sinewaves, arranged in dizzying, eye-defeating spirals and concentric ranks, an imprint of the Monument notation.

Montrose said, "They left us our own Monument? Can we translate it?"

"Not without considerably more calculation power than this ship currently..."

"Nope. We are not waking up your poxy monster brain. Let's ask the survivors."

That there was technological civilization still on Earth was not in doubt: in addition to the moon, two sails, nearly as broad as the main sail of the Emancipation, were orbiting at a half-geosynchronous rate. The Earth was not seen as the normal blue crescent astronauts approaching it tangentially to the sun would see: like a moving continent, a circle of light cast from the farside mirror was passing over the night of the world, and, equal and opposite, a circle of darkness hid the noonside of the world. The crescent of the Earth looked almost like a curving letter w, but only if the w were dotted like a small letter j.

Earth herself was shockingly unrecognizable: she had slowed her rate of spin, and the change in centrifugal force, imperceptible as it was, no longer created as large a bulge along her equator; therefore, Canada and Alaska and half of Russia were submerged in the polar sea, the Great Lakes basin was mingled with salt water. The Gulf of Mexico, on the other hand, was now an inland sea, for a second isthmus, of which Cuba and the Caribbean Islands were but hills, joined Florida to Northern Brazil.

Baja California was now the highest elevated of three peninsulas reaching into the Pacific like a hand whose fingertips dripped archipelagoes. India was now connected by an isthmus to Madagascar, making the Arabian Sea an inland lake larger than the Caspian.

A belt of the ocean severed South Africa from a combined Euro-Northafrican continent, and the Mediterranean basin, dry for many ages, had been flooded once more, lapping the slopes of the White Mountains and the Italian Alps. The higher elevations of Egypt and Libya were no more than large islands in this combined Mediterranean and Saharan sea; Mount Gibraltar and Mount Abyla were smaller islands, as was the lonely peak of Malta.

In the East, Australia and Indochina were now part of the Asian supercontinent, and the Sea of Japan was a dry and deep valley between the high plateaus of what had once been Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. In the West, a new land mass shaped like a snake had emerged from the mid-Atlantic ridge, an old fable of Plato now true, if in reverse. Antarctica was entirely submerged.

The ice caps were gone. The amount of water vapor in the air was far lower than it should have been. The sea level was lower by scores of meters than it should have been, even with the other catastrophic climatic changes.

"The orbit is more eccentric than it had been," announced Del Azarchel. "Much hotter summers and much cooler winters. The ice caps return in winter, I suppose, and reach far down toward the temperate zone. The angle of interaction between the Earth's magnetosphere and the surrounding solar environment should make aurora borealis and aurora australis visible year round and from every latitude. Other than that, from the surface this new orbit would provoke no obvious difference in the appearance of the skies. They even pointed the pole at the pole star, and imparted the exact same precession of the axes."

"The South Pole," grunted Menelaus dourly. "You'd think they'd get that detail right. But why did the Varmints move the Earth to a new orbit? What would be the point? And where are they now? Why aren't they shooting at us?" At her current parabolic orbit approaching Earth, the Emancipation with sail deployed would have been remarkably visible. Everyone on Earth, even without binoculars, would have seen caught in her sails the bright image of a smaller and colder second sun rising in the east, getting a little bigger every day.

Del Azarchel said, "I don't think the Virtue did this. Look at these figures." And he sent as text a few thousand lines of Monument notational math, showing the type of electromagnetic impulse that would have been necessary to move an object the size of the Earth to a new inclination.

Menelaus was able to take in the whole equation at a glance, but did not see the significance at first. He paused, divided his mind into several subsections working at different subjective speeds and organizing the information in different patterns and data-groupings before he saw the point. He rejoined his mind into one frame, and sent a low whistle of astonishment along the audio channel.

Del Azarchel must have noticed the pause. "You could have asked."

"I like reckoning things out for myself. Besides, if we are both thinking what I'm thinking we're thinking, that's independent confirmation. You think the Potentate died, wiped clean by the electromagnetic pulse."

"Crippled rather than died, depending on electrically inert backups and failovers, but yes. And I think that such a pulse happened before the new orbit. We can reconstruct the order of events. The Hyades Virtue connected the Earth and sun with a flux tube. For what reason, I don't know. That wiped the data out of the core mind. The whole mass of iron was aligned by the shock, and there was a line of plasma connecting the Earth to the sun. The Swans took advantage of it-I cannot tell if the flux tube lasted a second or lasted a decade-to maneuver the Earth into a new orbital inclination, at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Again, for what reason, I cannot fathom."

A flux tube was a cylindrical region of space where the magnetic field at the side surfaces is parallel to those surfaces. The sun had many such tubes rising from its surface and falling back again in vast arches, paths of least resistance followed by solar flares. Jupiter and Io were connected by a complex dance of flux tubes, carrying heavier and lighter cargoes of cold plasma, either buoyantly expanding away from the giant planet, or massively sinking toward its storm-filled atmosphere.

Since Jupiter was Del Azarchel's personal playground, the headquarters of the most massive project he, or any of the human race, had ever attempted, no doubt he was quicker to recognize the phenomena than Montrose.

Montrose said, "If we hadn't been kicked off the planet by the damnified critters we created..."

"You created...."

"... that got created somehow-or-'nuther, we would have been here to see the shindig."

Del Azarchel sighed. "I am wondering where the aliens are. The Monument indicated that they were coming here to rule us. It would bring order and peace."

"Peaceful as a pigsty. Farmer makes sure his swine don't fight each other. And all he asks in return is pork, bacon, and ham."

Del Azarchel said sardonically, "I can pick out human shapes occupying villages and towns, and the instruments show energy use along the seabeds, so the Melusine are not extinct. Our old friend the horse is still around, regrown from your Tomb archives. And ... look at this image. Do you think it is a sporting event?"

Montrose said, "War. Horse