Count to Infinity (Count to the Eschaton Sequence #6)

by John C. Wright

“I am not going to call the alien brain I am stuck inside of by the name I am totally buggered—this damnified thing is in my brain like a devil from hell—and it is reading my thoughts, eating my goddamn mind! AAARRGH! For one thing, it is too long.” Perhaps it could be called simply AAARRGH! That was much shorter.

The version of you who forgot his love, a creature more lithotroph than human, failed to pull the trigger, but died on the field of honor. Some say he turned his gun on himself before you shot him.” Montrose put his face in his hands. He shot himself in a duel for love of Rania. He remembered having done something like this before.

He sat up. He was naked as a jaybird, but someone had thoughtfully provided a flint-napped dagger hilted in rawhide, as well as a solid, flint-headed spear, so he did not feel weaponless. So someone knew something about human psychology, or at least his psychology. But not enough to have also provided a loincloth.

“We understand your psychology is based on a heterosexual physiognomy unusual even in the Orion Arm. The human drive to reproduce requires individuals to enter into a covenant and mutual intercourse with at least one of the other half of your oddly bifurcated species, who, equipped with different organs, glands, hormones, parasympathetic and nervous reactions, and neurochemistry, must of necessity have a complementary but unfamiliar reproductive strategy and communication tactics. Only a ferocious drive for unification with the other half of your sexual dyad could overcome this divergence between the sexes. We have seen you harness this powerful drive and divert it to various warlike efforts on behalf of our constituents. Also, your sexual reproduction necessitates communication with a sex alien to your own. Hence, you live by words and by war. Is this correct?” “Correct. That seems like a fair summation of the human race.” “We were speaking of you personally.”

“The terms predator and prey are inexact. Master and slave are a closer parallel, or puppet and puppeteer. The intelligence virus was not confined to any organic type or particular nook in the food chain. Lithotrophs, organotrophs, and autotrophs were all uplifted randomly into selfawareness, and many perished for lack of education. You understand our need for courtesy; only by the cooperation between deadly enemies could we spread the brain disease of intelligence to other organisms we found useful.”

The sensation of a baseball bat to the face was not any more pleasant when it came from an unexpected direction, without warning.

“And this help? It includes things as subtle as somehow tricking our astronomers into calling M44 the Beehive Cluster just to freak out the bee creatures living there, on the off chance that I would come along and mention that? How in the world could anyone arrange that coincidence over so many eons and lightyears?”

By the time the Milky Way collided with Andromeda, the war between them, for all practical purposes, was over.

Of the seven Archons that had combined to form the Milky Way mind, Orion had been the Archon whose verve and remorseless drive inspired and frightened and tempted the others into cooperation. Of the twenty-five Authorities forming the long-lost Orion Arm, the Benedictine was the most significant and influential of the ancient forefathers. The Benedictines were combination of three Dominions, issuing from the Collective at the Praesepe Cluster, the Abstraction at Orion Nebula, and the Empyrean at the Hyades Cluster. The Empyreans issued from a world called Eden, allegedly outside Hyades itself, and had displaced the original inhabitants of Hyades, a rude confederation of Virtues, Hosts, and races who names even devout paleohistorians could not with certainty invoke. Occupying the debris of the oldest archival strata were traces of the legendary founder of this Domination, an Empyrean called the Judge of Ages. He was the direct lineal ancestor of the memory chains of the last-known warlord of the Milky Way. Variations of him existed everywhere, of course; he was the base template for nearly every emissary form known in the Milky Way, and the founder of the Count-to-Infinity cliometric which had replaced the Cold Equations of the Interregnum. But such emissaries had been sent to Andromeda and rejected, even destroyed. No recent version of the countless copies would do, nor was there time to send to the core of the Milky Way, where the vast warlord Archon was last known to hav...

The armor he wore was not the dueling armor he had expected. The breastplate was chased with a design of red and gold fusils or lozenges, quartered with scallops and roses, and about the whole figure writhed the three-headed Serpent of Aulis, with three sparrows above, wings spread as if in frantic flight, tiny gold beaks open. The baldric was inscribed with letters of gold. N’Oubliez. Never forget.

“In the presence chamber of your dreaming mind, I take upon myself the symbols and metaphors most apt to your understanding. This crown is my sovereignty; these breasts the source of milk that sustains and feeds the myriads of my galaxy; this veil my chastity; the bridal gown the sign of my surrender and coming mental union with Milky Way, an intimate violation more intimate than rape, or else a consummation more fertile; these chains are the cliometry of creation, which operates at a larger scale than the history of races and the evolution of stars. You have a dim memory of myth about a royal woman thus chained, also named Andromeda, fated to be fed to a sea monster. The symbolism is compelling. Also, I occupy a female hence submissive position, pleading for your chivalry.”

She said, “That was why we attacked Milky Way. Your Throne would have formed a disorganized and uncoordinated mentality. By the time we interfered, one arm was a Colloquium, a voluntary arrangement fit only for talk, and the another was a Magisterium, a teaching Authority fit only for lecturing. You became the Authority of M3, then the Archon of Orion, and then one of the main components of the warfare hierarchy of Milky Way. You brought unity. You are a legendary figure in these days, in the time of the Third Awareness. But you were once the first imperator of the Milky Way, and its Nobilissimus.” “That word again!” he muttered. “I am always turning into what I hate.” “This is because your loves are not rightly ordered,” she said.

Montrose shook his head. “M3 never said anything about a duel, nor any of the Dominions me and mine conquered and combined into the Archon of Orion. The Throne of Milky Way did not think it was a duel.” “Milky Way is a Mowgli galaxy: an ignorant barbarian.”

Andromeda said, “I see that you understand the paradox involved. These are axiomatic beliefs. If life is finite, there can be no math, no logic, nothing which says using the Eschaton Engine to obliterate the majority of the universe in self-preservation is wrong. No game theory applies, because there is no retaliation, no tit for tat. No punishment. But if life is infinite, then an infinite game theory applies, and no act where the ends justifies the means is allowed, because there is no Concubine Vector, no eternal imbalance, no chance of any act escaping unpunished.”

Then how did she convince you?” “Many things she did in many ways, but in the final hour, she asked me one simple question, the same I asked you: ‘And what does absolute love do?’” “Eh? I don’t get it.” “Nor do I, because the answer must be larger than our universe. But Rania made me curious to seek and to see the answer, to taste it, imbibe it, live it. And between the choice of Malthus and Infinity, only choosing Infinity allows even for the possibility of an answer.”