Welcome back to the second week of 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 04: The Technology of Tyranny
Aeneas fell as a tree falls, unable to bend his knees or blink his eyes, toppling headfirst over the brink. It was five hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft under the massive pull of earth-normal gravity. Balcony after balcony flew past him.
Each balcony had its circle of glass coffins surrounding the empty shaft, and each coffin had its ice-pale and nude crewman, upside-down, undead eyes wide open, watching him fall.
He felt the cold pressure of their gaze on his flesh. His skin mottled leprously as the skincells died.
Aeneas could not struggle. All his voluntary muscles were paralyzed. The brain region he used to communicate with his ring was likewise numb. He could not speak with mouth or mind-circuit.
A crawling, reddish glow, the color of coals smoldering in hell, was at the bottom of the shaft. Here was what looked like a gyroscope of mirrored curves. It was an armature of three rings, each at right angles to the other, surrounding a singularity held in concentric force-spheres.
The rings were bright as looking glasses, and smooth as if made of quicksilver.
In the center, invisible in its own gravity, was a hole in space: the light was reddened by the Doppler effect, and cast a sullen, crimson glow up in the shaft, flickering on the undead bodies.
This was a warp core! Aeneas recognized what he was seeing. It was the Ninth Science. The armature rings were Tipler cylinders bent into circles.
The physicist Frank Tipler, back in the pre-Imperial days, had hypothesized that an infinitely long cylinder made of an unobtainable material denser than neutronium, if rotated at relativistic velocities, would create a closed timelike curve, violating local causality, allowing motions at faster than the speed of light.
He looked at it with awe. This superluminary engine was not hypothetical but real!
Even falling and tumbling, his senses could form a clear, crisp picture in his mind. These armature rings were not infinitely long, but a circle having no endpoints could produce the Tipler effect. The frame-dragging effects acting at right angles to each other could create a core whose center could project a variety of metrics, geometries, spacefolds and membrane intersections on the fabric of space.
Aeneas saw one other thing as well: lines of gold, thick as the pipes on a calliope, running down the shaft and converging on the warpcore.
The singularity was not made of normal matter. Anything which had mass, if its gravity well were steep enough, would form a singularity. This was a warpcore formed by death-energy produced from all the unliving necroforms who had once been crewmen.
The great engine was so unimaginable, so impossible, that it almost distracted him from the fact that it was about to kill him.
His armor would not save him from impact, any more than an egg in a metal flask could be flung down stairwell unbroken. Striking one of the armature rings at this velocity would surely kill him, or so he prayed.
If he missed the silver rings of Tipler substance, he would strike, or, rather approach, the hollow singularity at their center. Time would distort, and he would be falling forever headfirst into a bottomless knot of tortured spacetime. Meanwhile the accretion disk of pure death-energy would drain his nerve cells of self-awareness and willpower, his muscles of motion, his bones and cells of growth, his flesh of heat.
The tidal effects would tear him into a single bloody strand of spaghetti, but preserved by unlife, he would never die, and the sensations of pain would never stop.
A voice spoke: “Save him! He is needed!”
As swiftly and suddenly as that, his downward motion stopped.
A disinertia field gripped him, and a tractor beam intersected his center of mass, and moved him carefully to the side, so that he would not strike the armature. Above a bare metal area of deck, the disinertia field snapped off, and he fell face first to the floor. He could not raise his hands to break his fall nor even close his eyes to protect his eyeballs. It was very painful.
A while later, he heard the metallic footsteps of Lord Pluto approaching, and felt the vibration in the deck.
“Well, young son of Lady Venus, I keep you alive for now. You have, however, seen what can never been seen, and so you must never leave this place.”
Aeneas could see the drive chamber all about him, the armature of the warpcore, the balconies above, but not Lord Pluto. He could feel gauntlets hoist his nude body up on a shoulder, an awkward burden with arms and legs sticking out. He could feel the cold metal surface of the helmet his uncle wore, the fabric of the cloak over his shoulders, the iron-clad fingers. He could smell him, hear his breathing.
Aeneas had a visual cortex considerably more complex and convoluted than an unmodified man. Segments of extra brain matter had been grafted in to allow him to interpret visual information from gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, radio waves reaching from high to low, and also from Geiger counter organs, paramagnetic and electroreception cells.
But his magnificent, complex sensory systems detected nothing. His every sense told him was held in midair by no one.
The disinertia field acted, and the tractor beam flicked down from an emitter held on an arm projecting from the uppermost balcony. Aeneas and the unseen Lord Pluto, lacking inertia, were brought immediately level with the top of the twentieth balcony without any jerk or jar.
The nozzle swiveled and the beam reversed polarity, becoming a presser beam. They were thrust through an open hatch in center of the overhead. The hatch was directly above the tractor-presser emitter. Inertia returned. The hatch clanged shut, and Aeneas was dumped unceremoniously onto the hard surface, face upward.
Lord Pluto faded into visibility. He was a tall figure, draped in a long cloak. His face was hidden behind an opaque, unornamented helmet. His gauntlets and boots were metal. There was a square iron chair without cushion or footstool. Lord Pluto stiffly sat. He raised his fist. The signet ring on his finger twinkled. A harsh and colorless white light came from the bulkheads.
The deck had no carpet. To the left of the iron chair was a board with a loaf of bread and a carafe of wine. To the right on a stand was a square object Aeneas did not at first remember was a book. There were no other furnishings. The cabin walls were bare.
Aeneas scanned the room with different combinations of his senses. There were no mechanisms in the room, no energy flows, nothing hidden behind the walls. He wondered what was preventing his nerves from operating.
He was surprised when his signet ring answered his thought. I cannot identify the source or nature of the paralytic energy suppressing your nerve actions. Involuntary nerves are unaffected. The bioadmantium fibers used to command your non-carbon-based bones and scales are likewise unaffected. Reply through them.
Perhaps Lord Pluto could only paralyze biological structures he expected to find in the victim.
“How are you reaching me?”
I am routing through the local neuropsionic network into your cortex.
“What? You are using his house net?”
There are no security protocols here.
That, more than anything else, brought home to Aeneas how isolated a hermit Lord Pluto must be. But with no children, wife, servants, visitors or life on this world, why lock anything? The thought was disorienting.
“Can you send a command signal to the warpcore orientation controls?”
To the what?
“It is directly below us. That silvery armature holds a hollow singularity within a contortional polygravitic field. When spun up to speed, it can create or collapse a warp field able to alter the fundamental physical constants of nearby timespace, and allow normal matter to be transmitted without harm though a closed timelike curve! It is warp technology, the final science! Grandfather Tellus was rumored to have it, but it was never confirmed. Some of my uncles do not believe warptech exists at all!”
Only as he said this, did he realize that the thing was impossible.
“Am I going mad? How could I recognize a warpcore? I don’t know about it! How can I know this?”
It is no delusion. Activity in the correct lobes of your brain indicates you have the proper memories present.
“How? Memories from where?”
At that moment, the panels of the ceiling retracted into the walls. The colorless and harsh lights now turned their beams upward. A wide, dark dome was above. Hanging beneath the center of the dome and almost filling it was a coppery metallic orb.
The substance was one he did not recognize. It was neither matter nor energy. The orb was covered in hieroglyphs, as convoluted and folded as a cauliflower. It looked like a dull orange brain. Little discolorations speckled every side of it. Aeneas had the impression of immense age.
Lord Pluto said, “Behold, Son of Lady Venus. This is the Infinithedron.”
Even as Aeneas looked up at the metallic shape, he saw its wrinkled surface was in motion. Wherever his eyes turned, the folds opened, redoubled, and re-folded, adding wrinkles upon wrinkles. But when he looked back to another hemisphere of the complex surface, he saw it was, at first, the same as it had when last he looked at it.
Lord Pluto said, “It is a fractal symmetrical many-sided solid whose faces cannot be counted, because the act of counting or calculating them increases the number. This is the Final Library of a race Father called the Forerunners. It cannot be examined completely, because the act of examination increases its complexity, unfolding more symbol surfaces. It was apparently merely a black cube of six letters when the expedition first found it. Let us allow it to rest!”
The ceiling panels slid back into place. The harsh lights cut off. It would have been pitch black in here to a normal human, but, of course, Aeneas could still see the heat Pluto gave off, sense the energies riding Pluto’s ringfinger, and hear the radar-ping from Pluto’s armor, feel the magnetic contours of the armored figure in his iron chair.
Lord Pluto was sitting with his elbows on the chair arms, fingers of his gauntlets templed before his bowed helmet.
“A fascinating question is how is it that you recognize a superluminary engine, the one secret Lord Tellus never revealed to any of his children, but you do not recognize the Infinithedron?
“A second question, of less interest, is this: you appear to have knowledge of the superluminary science. It is also called the Final Science. It is the Tyrant Technology. It is the one that Father would use to quell the various powers granted his children whenever they rebelled, but that he did not use during our last, successful, rebellion. Knowing you to be in possession of that science, what possible reason could exist for keeping you alive?”
Aeneas felt a moment of anger, followed by crushing shame. Of course nothing was locked, and Sig had been allowed to open a neuropsionic circuit through the household net! There was no easier way to eavesdrop on thoughts, than to let a fool put them on your net for you.
Sig protested. Sir, I examined the net most carefully beforehand. No observer is present! It is impossible to read thoughts without being read!
Evidently Lord Pluto had some means of masking his presence not merely to senses, but also to thoughts. Aeneas cursed himself. It was not his fault that he was on this world!
Lord Pluto said patiently, “Please concentrate. That your trespass was unintentional is irrelevant: execution is the penalty. Nonetheless, I am curious about the reason for keeping you alive. Think carefully and clearly. Your next thoughts will determine your fate.”
But his mind was blank. There was nothing to say.
He turned off his ring, ending the mindlink, and the conversation. He waited for death, wishing he could close his eyes.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told!
Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.
Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!
Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!
I appreciate you posting this, like this, and I'll read it in its entirety.
Thank you: I believe in making posts available, freely, to the public, for the good it does to society. Best wishes.
I love this story. John C. Wright's books are always guaranteed to be great!