Welcome back to our Serial Sunday, featuring Superluminary, a wonderful science fiction tale by John C. Wright that we’re pleased to present as a serial each Sunday here on Fandom Pulse.
Episode 05: The Many Murders of the Mad Emperor
Lord Pluto sat in the dark on his black chair, draped in his voluminous black cloak, motionless, saying nothing. His helmet faceplate was featureless save for a single camera lens, like a Cyclopes eye, in the crown.
At his feet lay Aeneas, paralyzed and naked, his eyes dry and aching because he could not blink. Aeneas could see the heat signature, ultraviolet image, magnetic contour, and neural activity of the other man. The slow, even rhythm of electroneural flows showed Lord Pluto’s dispassionate inward calm.
Aeneas retained control of the bioadmantium fibers and scales which made up his armor and bones. He flexed the subcutaneous armor scales in his ringfinger in Morse code, hoping Sig the ring would understand.
Sig did. Sir, if you wish me to open a mindlink, please be aware that Lord Pluto’s local net allows him to read your surface thoughts when I do.
Aeneas knew Lord Pluto was keeping him alive only to hear his answers to certain questions. As it happened, Aeneas had questions as well: he saw no reason not to slake his curiosity, even if he had but a short while to live.
Lord Pluto said thoughtfully, “Hope is a peculiar phenomenon of the nervous system. Living beings are often afflicted by it. Necroforms never are. Hope allows life to struggle past the point of futility. The undead cannot. One wonders which of the two is the more logical.”
Aeneas was willing to talk, but not to have his mind read.
Lord Pluto did not move, but his signet ring twinkled. Aeneas felt the paralysis leave his face, mouth, lips and tongue, and also the artificial neuropsionic speech centers in his brain allowing him direct and private thought communication with his own signet ring.
Aeneas said, “I propose a trade. A question of yours for each one you answer of mine.”
“Bargaining is not in my nature. Why should I agree?”
Aeneas said, “Because I cannot be tortured and cannot suffer deprivation. Do you think pain or starvation can affect me? Hah! I just walked across the surface of Pluto at night, naked.”
“You are proud of being a biotechnological monstrosity,” Lord Pluto mused.
Aeneas said, “It is a branch of the stratonics no one else in the family wanted to exploit. With eight uncles, three aunts, one mother, two hundred fourteen cousins and siblings, all the good supersciences were taken.”
Lord Pluto said, “Your mother has not instructed you in the art of neuropsionic surgery? All my siblings fear her greatly. They suspect she has altered their minds upon occasion without their knowledge.”
“She has imprinted me with what is called autonoetics. I can perform limited neuropsionic alterations on myself. It allows me to change the function of nerves. Other than that, no. And I was given the various secrets of terraforming and pantropy, as are all Lords of Creation. Why is it that your world has never been engineered for earthlike life?”
“The reason you beheld,” said Lord Pluto. “No men are allowed to share a world with the Infinithedron, lest they learn the secrets of the Lords of Creation.”
“You could have birds and beast.”
“Lesser creatures nearing this tower would die, be drained, and their lives would be fed into the warpcore, which I dare not allow. The necroforms would increase in strength, and their dark powers reach eventually to all the continents of Pluto, and lick the nearer hemisphere of Charon free of life.
“But I could ask you the same question,” Lord Pluto continued. “You were given the Trojan asteroid 1172 Äneas when you came of age. It is yet a lifeless rock in space. All the other Trojan asteroids are green as emeralds and blue as sapphires, streaked and dappled with white cloud. Your cousins have erected tunnels of coherent air so as to let iridescent birds and luminous giant insects soar from one floating asteroid to the next.”
“The common man worships the family as if we are gods,” said Aeneas bitterly.
Lord Pluto said, “Not without reason.”
“But we rob them of their spirit! My asteroid is the size of Montana: I could have, like my cousins, filled it with a race designed to my desires, programmed to be as loyal as dogs. But it is forbidden to share our knowledge of planetary engineering and biotechnology with them. I would be one more Lord with a worldlet full of pets.”
Lord Pluto said, “Why does that displease you?”
“It is a mental illness to treat one’s fellow man as underlings.”
Lord Pluto said, “I do not grasp the answer, but answer you did. Ask.”
“Wait. Did you accept my deal?”
“Obviously. A wasted question. My turn. Who sent you here?”
“No one.”
“By that, do you mean you do not know who sent you?”
“A wasted question! My turn. Why did you ask about my asteroid?”
Lord Pluto said, “I wondered if you had been commanded to keep your little world free of life, as I have been.”
“Who gives Pluto orders?”
“Ah, but it is my turn, again. Your apartments in Mount Everest were destroyed by a space-contortion attuned to a partner node in the wreckage of the Expedition Habitat at the foot of Mons Wright. You did not place that node. Who did?”
Aeneas said, “I found an unstable pearl hidden in a strongbox in my bedchamber. I used it because an assassin was attacking.”
“The same assassin whom you smuggled into Everest. And you thought to come here, while I was summoned to the conclave. You flee the scene and kill your hireling, all at once.”
“That is not what happened, and it is my question! You said no life could survive here while the necroforms were feeding the warpcore. Why not simply turn the warpcore engine off?”
“Interference with the death-energy feed would dissolve the core in a wash of Hawking radiation. It cannot be shut down, nor the necroforms killed.”
“What? You do know the singularity is hollow, don’t you? A simple space metric manipulation could… ah…”
Lord Pluto said, “Go on.”
“But… it is your question.”
“That is my question. Go on. You know how the superluminary engine can be quelled and restarted?”
“Yes. The core is a ball of unwarped space surrounded by singularity material on all sides. Hence the volume and time-rate, from the outside frame of reference, are Schroedingered. Utterly uncertain. That means they can be collapsed by the observer into a preferred value. A superluminary value. Altering the gravity constant would prevent the Hawking effect.”
“But no observation can pass through a singularity shell.”
“Not without violating causality, no. That is what the armatures are for. Why ask me, rather than the Infinithedron?”
By way of answer, the ceiling panels drew back again, revealing the vast coppery convoluted surface of the Infinithedron. The great orb rotated, and the upper hemisphere came into view.
Aeneas saw a vast wound where the material was scoured, scarred, burned, blackened. The scar’s edges began to twitch weakly, irregularly when Aeneas looked, curling awkwardly to create new tiles. It almost looked like a crippled living thing in pain.
Lord Pluto said, “Lord Tellus took steps to ensure secrecy. My question: When was the contortion pearl hidden in your bedchamber?”
Aeneas said, “Perhaps years…”
But his signet ring said, If I may? Unstable nodes are dangerous instruments, easily spotted by routine security sweeps. No pearl was in your chamber before the attack by Thoon. I first saw it when Thoon activated his vampirism to slay your guards.
Aeneas repeated this.
Lord Pluto said, “I would ask what technology can place a black pearl into a locked strongbox in the most secure wing of the most heavily shielded fortress imaginable, but it is your turn.”
“Don’t ask, because I would guess it was yours, Lord Pluto. Your tech could have rendered the pearl invisible until needed. How was the superluminary engine built? And why haven’t you flown to the stars?”
Lord Pluto said, “That is two questions, but you answered one extra. I cannot operate the great engine on any more than I can turn it off.
“The other answer is longer. Listen:
“In the first decade of the Twenty-Fifth Century, the Sino-Anglican Space Agency launched the Cerberus mission to Pluto. There were three hundred and one brave souls aboard, all volunteers, sent to investigate traces of nonhuman intelligence. The ship followed a high-impulse trajectory hyperbolic solar escape orbit of thirty kilometers per second, eleven year travel time each way, with three years on Pluto until the return launch window was available.
“Near the end of the third year, a cache of intact machinery was found. It was ten million years old, all in perfect working order, including the Infinithedron, which contained the instructions. You have heard this tale before?”
Aeneas said, “It is the history of how Lord Tellus established the dynasty. As a master scientist, he discovered the alien signals. Overcoming all odds, he funded and captained the expedition, and was betrayed by his crew.”
“All falsehoods,” Lord Pluto said dryly. “The reality is more prosaic: The signals were discovered by orbital radiotelescopes. The expedition itself was launched by the Sino-Anglican Space Agency. Sir Ingelbert Ling was captain. He occupies the first coffin below. Father was the ship’s political officer, there to deter heretical political opinions from forming amid the scientific personnel. His name then was Evripades Zenon Telthexorthopolis.”
A howling came from underfoot. These were voices of the ice-pale undead hanging in their coffins. Lord Pluto waited patiently for the yowls to sink into sobs and silence.
“They still curse his name. With good reason. The political officer had certain privileges the others lacked, override codes, weapons. He managed to trap the crew in the ship’s axis, helpless.
“However, he could not man the ship unaided. He decided to use his three hundred prisoners as guinea pigs to test the brain-alteration machinery. The errors drove the crew insane.
“Finally he succeeded, and was imprinted with the secrets of creation. But by then, the launch window had passed, Pluto and Earth were no longer in favorable positions, and the Cerberus was stranded.
“To return to Earth, he must take control of the warpcore found in the cache. To power it, he must use a source of negative life-energy, which is generated by necrotic cells when they enter the shadow condition. So he biotransformed the surviving crew, insane or not, into vampiric but soulless necroform automatons.
“Once home, he discovered that war, mass starvation, plagues and meschenjaegers had destroyed civilization. Terraforming let him smother radioactive clouds, and undo ecological damage. Pantropy allowed him to shower honeydew and nectar from manna clouds onto starving areas, to make Siberia and the Sahara bloom with fruits, and all the seas with fish, and revive the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird. His panaceas cured all plagues and abolished aging.
“But when the Grand Mandarin of China, the Supreme Godfather of America, His Most Royal Catholic Majesty of Brazil and the Dalai Lama of Greater Tibet were all restored to youth, their peoples wanted to resume the wars.
“These four world leaders were pulled from their palaces, dangled in midair above their capitals and torn to bits by invisible force needles. Then Father married their widows and daughters, and crowned himself the Emperor of Man, Lord Tellus. No one could pronounce Telthexorthopolis.”
Lord Pluto heaved a sigh. “Later, after the side effects of his own brain imprint began to erode his mind, did he recreate the mermaids in Atlanta, Georgia, drown the city in the sea, replace Antarctica with jungles and fill it with dinosaurs, and perform other such extravagances. But I am eldest: I knew him when he was young, and sane.”
Aeneas then sensed the antenna beyond the hull overhead receive a burst of coherent radio. He saw activity in the signet ring of Lord Pluto, and in Pluto’s cortex.
“Ah! Your mother is calling. No doubt she wishes to beg for your life. How tedious.”
Lord Pluto, with a gesture, paralyzed the mouth of Aeneas, striking him mute.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
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