“If ever I find her, it will be centuries after you are dust.”
“I will instruct one of my future incarnations, after achieving the Fourth Spiritual Density, to use the Elder Star Sign to transcend time and space and communicate with me here and now, and then I will know it, without knowing how I know.”
Trey smirked and stood on tiptoe and whispered something in his ear.
“Yes, ah! Strike that last comment!” Mickey hastily corrected himself, “I mean, I will be in heaven among the saints and martyrs, and, looking down, will know if you have met with success in your great quest.”
Montrose looked at him long and hard. “What is your other motive?”
Mickey looked a little surprised, but bowed and said, “Compassion for Del Azarchel. What if he meets the real Rania? She knows the secret of peace. As I have said, he will destroy himself. I have seen this in a dream. The White Christ whom once I reviled, and now I serve, can heal such wounds, wounds of the spirit, self-inflicted wounds; for the magic of the Son of Man is strong, stronger than earth, wider than sky, deeper than ocean, and deeper than the fiery inferno and therefore can overthrow all fates, heal all harms, and make all things new, which even Tash, Oroborous, nor Melkor, to whom once I bowed in adoration, cannot do. But the price is that one must humble oneself to receive the blessing. This, Del Azarchel will never do. But he might for her sake.”
Montrose said dismissively, “He does not love her.”
Mickey said, “Human emotions are complex and subtle beyond the lore of magicians or the wisdom of bishops. Was he not also her father? You don’t want to see him damned, do you?”
Montrose looked up and saw the elevator descending. The figure inside had swum through the air with the un-self-aware grace of an old space hand, and he wore the silver-caped black uniform of the Hermetic Order, and a red ring was on his wrist.
Montrose said slowly, “I am still sort of making up my mind about that. I have not forgot how much I owe Captain Grimaldi. He gave me the stars.”
3. The Circular Singularity
Del Azarchel passed through the door, which was a multistate material which turned fluid, parted around him like a bubble, and became solid glass behind him with a rubbery pop of noise as he stepped through.
He spoke without any preamble: “I was able to examine the interior of the black sphere using instruments that Ain described and Torment built for me. The attotechnology drive, I finally discovered, is a ring of singularity matter denser than neutronium spun at ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light so that particles of negative mass can be orbited near the event horizon, accelerated by the frame dragging of the ring, and shot out through the dead center where the gravity forces cancel out to zero, losing some energy due to tidal effects but keeping enough that they can be directed against the sail in a propulsion beam.
“It looks like a perpetual motion machine, as absurd as if a man in a sailboat were to wave an ostrich plume fan at the canvas and impart motion.
“What prevents it from being a true perpetual motion machine is two things: One is the negative mass of the Bondi-Forward particles. These particles, when encountering equal and opposite mass, produce a constant acceleration of the system toward the positive-mass object. It is from this that the ship derives her self-accelerating motion. Two, the point in time at which the universe will one day balance its books is lost in the depths of the ring singularity event horizon, where time passes so slowly, the bookkeeper demanding to know where the extra energy comes from will never—from our frame of reference—put in an appearance to demand the bill be paid.
“So, while, technically speaking, every action still has an equal and opposite reaction, and entropy still rules all things and ruins all things, and conservation is conserved, nonetheless we observers here in this frame of reference, aboard the ship but not inside the microsingularity of the drive, we will never see the equal reaction. From our frame of reference, entropy is reversed, and momentum comes from nowhere—that is, from somewhere outside our frame of reference.”
Montrose said, “Why can’t the aliens just use these things to make an infinite amount of energy, then? Use one perpetual motion machine to spin a second up to speed, and the second gives back more energy than it takes to the first, and so on?”
Del Azarchel said, “As I said, it only seems to be a perpetual motion machine from one frame of reference. The drive also requires a supply of particles of negative mass, which don’t exist in nature, and which Ain cannot construct. He cannot fold spacetime into tiny knots with enough delicacy to make new and exotic fundamental particles, but this is apparently something the Domination of Praesepe can do—make the fuel, that is, not the drive. The drive disk is more massive than our whole solar system, when seen edge on from a femtometer away, but otherwise is seen as a lightweight substance akin to metallic hydrogen, possessing zero density and zero inertia. Do I need to say it is also made of attotechnology particles, quanta of fundamental matter-energy that cannot exist in nature? The drive cylinder is a substance that seems to be made of neutronium, but otherwise. Our old friend, Mother Selene would call it magic. Neither Hyades nor Praesepe can create an artifact like this drive.”
Montrose said, “I wonder why M3 gave it to False Rania.”
Del Azarchel said, “It is a treasure, now yours, and worth guarding most jealously.” He turned to Mickey and Trey. “No matter how advanced the technology, no one overcomes the laws of nature themselves. In this case, it is simply a fact that the human mind is too complex to broadcast across interstellar distances in any reasonable amount of time. Far more information can be embedded into tiny dark matter packages, but they travel slowly and require very delicate receivers to catch them. That is where the singularity drive comes in:
“It seems that even without fuel, spinning the pseudo-neutronium core up to speed still creates frame dragging and a gravitic node point—think of a singularity shaped like a doughnut with a spot of normal-metric space in the middle—which means that particles of normal matter can be sped up to lightspeed without requiring infinite energy or suffering infinite Lorenz contraction. Or, I should say, technically, the accelerated particle seems to some observers, those looking at it sideways, to have those properties, whereas an observer directly in front of or behind the singularity doughnut, looking through the hole, will see no change. My point is that even without the fuel, Ain can use the singularity drive effect to broadcast dark matter packets at lightspeed, in order to be able to send an entire human brain worth of information across the lightyears with little or no signal loss. Are you still committed to this plan?”
They both nodded assent, Mickey glumly, Trey eagerly.
Del Azarchel said, “During the Silurian Period, the Panspermian Forerunners were destroyed and scattered, and the Dominations and Dominions composing the Archonate were broken up into their separate Dysons, strandworlds, ringworlds, cloudworlds, and Jupiter Brains. Those whose solar systems which still show observable traces of industrial activity or stellar engineering are the targets to which Ain wishes to broadcast the minds of the human volunteers, blindly risking oblivion in the hope that a working receiver, raised in reply to vanguard signals, might be able to catch them and reconstruct emulations of them. The dangers they face, they will face with more spirit, knowing you two have braved the risk before them.
“Without this sacrifice, this vessel can move no farther, nor Rania be saved, nor, if the inevitable cliometry we have seen back in the human Empyrean we left behind us is any judge, does the race of man have any future in this galaxy. Will you face it? I can join in the danger only in spirit, only in the prayers of a grateful race, but I cannot share your glory.”