His higher-level mind was now the central mass of the remote plutino maintaining orbital resonance with Neptune. It was named 28978 Ixion. Montrose liked the name; Ixion was a character from myth who won the love of the queen of the heavenly goddesses.
Except for an outer layer of rust-colored tholin and water ice maintained as camouflage, the volume of the four-hundred-mile-diameter worldlet—the distance from Dallas to San Antonio—had been converted to logic diamond. It was all him, all brain. In chambers and tombs and capillaries honeycombed through his crystal brain cells he kept the smaller and outer personalities. Each had been assigned a human-shaped body, modified in the fashion of the Hermeticists to be spaceworthy.
This variation had an intelligence of two thousand, about what Exarchel enjoyed in his heyday covering the entire surface of the Earth. This Montrose brought more and more miles of his crystal self into awareness, heat, and motion, as he puzzled over the information of his ingathered lesser selves. He watched through several sophisticated instruments covering several bands of the spectrum with a sardonic expression deepening on the completely imaginary face he maintained in his proprioception emulator.
Yes, he had expressions. Montrose long ago had found that if his electronic brain could not feel the slide and tension of facial muscles, his emotional changes did not synchronize with his biological versions and emulations.
So he kept his face running even while he slept, and this allowed him to pry open one disbelieving eye and sigh a majestic sigh, and feel his lips draw back in an angry smile, displaying his large, square, equine teeth, even though, in reality, the eye and eyelid, the breath, the sensation of lips and teeth and tongue and the rest was just a flow of numbers through a sensorium which was itself an emulation. So what? In reality the atoms of his real flesh and blood body were clouds of subatomic particles, which were, in turn, nothing more than a flow of numbers through the foam of timespace.
And so the ghost grimaced and grunted, because a vehicle was approaching from Jupiter. That meant it was Blackie’s people. Maybe Blackie himself.
He focused a radio laser and narrowcast a warning to stay away, repeating the message in Latin, Anglatino, Virginian, Intertextual, Melusine Verbal, and Glyphic, and the base introduction pattern for developing a Swan dyad language. There was no response.
Montrose watched them for one hundred fifty days, decided they were not a threat, merely an annoyance, and let the vessel land—or, to be precise, considering the small size of the asteroid he filled, let the vessel lay alongside.
But who and what were they?
He combed through the records collected over the millennia by his lesser selves who had watched and slumbered century by century.
2. Enigma in Sagittarius
The records showed a number of anomalies, ranging from the astonishing to the inexplicable.
In the Sixteenth Millennium there had been a fluctuation in the solar photosphere, and the annihilation of a geometrically straight line of particles beyond the heliopause. Someone had activated one of the mile-wide neutronium rings which the Asmodel Virtue had left floating in the convective zone of the sun.
Any of these seventeen rings, when rotated at near-lightspeed, created a Einsteinian effect called frame-dragging, which acted as a gravitomagnetic Penrose energy extraction mechanism, very similar to that produced by the accretion disk of a microquasar, and emitted a relativistic jet, powered by the ultradense solar plasma. Some unknown (and to earthly science, impossible) side effect of the frame-dragging polarized and aligned the wave-particles in the jet, forcing the energy into a coherent beam.
Montrose examined in awe the record of a nameless rogue ice giant world, a lump of frozen gas larger than Jupiter, the orphan of some failed solar dust-disk that never formed a star, who wandered into the path of the beam hundreds of lightyears away, being evaporated into brightly colored mist.
The reflections of the interstellar laserlight off the mist particles gave Montrose enough information to deduce the precise beam path. It was not pointed at any of the colonies of man, but at the Omega Nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, five thousand lightyears away. What had been launched there and why? The only other thing Montrose could see in that region of space worth investigating was a blue hypergiant and variable star, V4030 Sagittarius, over seven thousand lightyears away, emitting one solar mass per day in its solar wind.
In the Seventeenth Millennium, Earth had lost her magnetic field, and unmodified human life walked abroad only at night. There had not been a drop in industrial activity during the day, but it did not follow the spacing patterns or diurnal rhythms of any First Human race, or of the Swans. This implied some new and third race of man, not a mere subspecies, now ruled Earth.
There was an Ice Age covering most of the Earth’s surface in the early Twentieth Millennium. At the same time, energy discharges consonant with very large-scale industrial activity had been detected near Ceres, Vesta, and soon the other large asteroids in the main belt. Changes in mass indicated that they were being hollowed out. Changes in surface reflections indicated that they were being spun for gravity. The whole miniature world would form a carousel, against whose walls the centrifugal force could hold a layer of air, parks and lakebeds, farms and gardens. Montrose was delighted. It was something from his childhood comics come to life: O’Neill colonies! Someone had finally figured out that the surface of a planet was not the wisest place to live in this dangerous universe.
Then the Ice Age came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the millennium. A number of energy discharges consonant with the use of asteroid drops as weapons erupted over the globe on several continents. The impacts not as severe as the fall of 1036 Ganymed had been, but severe enough to abolish the ice practically overnight. A structure of flux tubes issuing from the north and south pole of Earth and reaching to the Van Allen Radiation Belts became a permanent part of the magnetosphere during this era; Montrose could not fathom their purpose. Perhaps they acted as guidepaths for energy beams meant to deflect or deter the asteroid drops.
Energy discharges consonant with major wars between the asteroid-based civilization and the Earth continued to register even on instruments as far away as the Ixion plutino across the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Millennia. Then the traces stopped. Unwilling to believe that man had learned the arts of peace, Montrose assumed that a new form of weapon, deadlier or cheaper or both, than antimatter or asteroid drop had been developed.
From these clues, he could deduce something about the nature and mission of the emissaries aboard the vessel hanging near him, but those deductions merely opened larger and deeper questions.
One drawback of knowing that there was a smarter version of yourself you could wake yourself into was that, no matter how sure you were of your results, you always wanted the more expensive energy-hogging super-version of yourself to double-check them.
And here was a mystery too deep for him. This ship should not be here.
3. Picotechnology
Ironically, the asteroid-sized Angel-mind version of Montrose was bulkier than the Archangel-mind version of himself. This higher version of Montrose was housed in a chunk of murk, partly solid, partly liquid, and partly extending half an angstrom into eleven dimensions, which occupied the space in his skull in and around and between the cells of his flesh and blood brain. This brain system was above the ten thousand level, roughly the intelligence Selene commanded.
The science of picominiaturization discovered from retro-engineering the murk left behind in the First Sweep allowed mankind, not without astonishing effort and expenditure of resources, to fit the intelligence complexity and capacity of the core of the moon into a body not much larger than a post-cetacean Melusine.