The Architect of Aeons by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429951685
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

2

The War of Sol and Ain

1. The Cloud

A.D. 24087

Thousands of years ago, the cloud humans had dubbed Cahetel had been traveling so near to the speed of light that it seemed to earthbound observers to be a disk flattened in the direction of motion, blue-shifted into the cosmic ray band of the spectrum, and so massive that its gravity distorted the image of the star Epsilon Tauri, also called Ain, lying directly behind it.

The exact nature of the beam from Ain, which was pointed directly at Sol, occluded and filtered by passing through the cloud, proved impossible to analyze.

After the cloud passed the halfway mark at seventy-five lightyears, the beam of energy issuing from Epsilon Tauri changed in character, and the cloud began losing mass.

Earthly astronomers were not certain how a starbeam overtaking the Cahetel cloud from astern could be decelerating the cloud. There were many theories, from the sensible to the absurd. One of the more sensible was that the Ain beam was exciting certain volatile particles set aside for that purpose into jets facing forward into the bowshock wave of the cloud. These jets acted as rockets to brake the payload mass of the cloud, and at the same time the payload was polarized to not be affected by the beam, not accelerated further.

One of the more absurd was that that starbeam from Ain was magnetic, and retarding the progress of the cloud, or was made of antigravitons, or some other exotic particle, to act as drag-chute or sea anchor or tractor beam.

No one knew. But the loss of cloud mass as the centuries turned into millennia was more consistent with the absurd tractor beam theory than the sensible polarized beam theory.

The cloud was now slowing for a rendezvous for the Solar System, and had matched Sol’s lateral motion through the interstellar medium in Sol’s long, slow orbit around the galactic core. It was one lightyear away.

Montrose had parked his body somewhere, so that technicians could work on increasing his brain capacity, while his mind roamed the libraries of the Noösphere. From the many instruments of many astronomical satellites and observatories, he could see two sources of energy in and near the cloud. Something was boiling at the center of the cloud, giving off vents of X-ray and infrared radiation. There were also smaller flicks or blurs of light streaking the astronomical image, looking almost like a meteor shower.

Hundreds of pellets, from the size of baseballs to the size of aircraft carriers had been placed in the oncoming path of the Cahetel cloud, surfaces inscribed over with the lines and curves and hieroglyphs both of Monument notation and of the later Cenotaph notation left on the moon by Asmodel.

It was a contact message, explaining in the awkward pantomime language of the Monument and the Cenotaph, that mankind intended to defy Cahetel, to render the prospect of forced deracination to far colonies economically unfeasible according to the Hyades’ own cold equations of interstellar power.

“Well, well,” said Montrose to himself, “our modest message in a bottle.

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