Chapter 37: The Truth About Caliban

“I would like to...”

Cass seemed out of breath. She had never experienced this state before. She continued:

“David ... sent you a message from a certain planet before disappearing. I’m here for that. To get the full content.”

“His ghost haunts me to this day. So, Stella, you want to find a weapon against the Transients? You think it’s on Caliban?”

“You shouldn’t say things like that. I know people who ventured into that territory, and they mysteriously died.”

“The Transients won’t harm us here. The After is sacred ground to them. If we are to believe them, we are almost like them here.”

She removed her Inca helmet and tousled her hair.

“To the victor, a wish, and you want to know everything, so I will tell you everything. To understand this story properly, it should be told from the middle, not the beginning. You’ll see, in many ways, that time, causes, and consequences form unusual knots in this tale.

Our story begins when David Ilsner, a brilliant scientist and quite the lover, makes a discovery on a previously ignored planet: Caliban-1. That was two centuries ago. He writes a report, a complete one, and sends it to me, and also sends an abridged version to the universities. The Transients, who have eyes everywhere, intercept it and become frightened. Yes, Stella. The Gods tremble.”

“Why?”

“You can imagine that this report contains something that threatens them. They can’t discreetly kill thousands of humans already aware of it, scattered across a hundred worlds; they can’t commit genocide when our only sin was natural curiosity, so they do something else. They go to Caliban-1. Only the Blind Gods know what they do to David ... the Transients, however, activate something ... a magical spell or an infernal machine ... something that emits anti-entropy. Do you understand what that implies?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Basically, everything related to Caliban-1 and attached to it, all information, gradually gets destroyed. Not for you, not for me, not for others, not because we’re powerful, but because the brain is a machine that saves data in loops. If you see the word Caliban-1 on a screen corner, you’ll forget it. But if you make it a way of life, if you’re obsessed with that damn planet, it will stay in your head.

Now, you must understand that the anti-entropic radiation, according to David, spreads in all dimensions: in the three dimensions of the universe, in the multiverses, where there’s probably a resonance effect that multiplies the effect, but also in both directions of time: future and past. As for the future, we’re not sure, but the past, definitely. That’s the starting point of all this nonsense.”

“Wait, if anti-entropy spreads into the past, does that mean that since the beginning of human history, no one can be interested in Caliban-1 because of a future event?”

“You’ve got it. But no need to go that far back. Let’s go back to the early stellar era, the time when the HS was sending ships randomly everywhere to catalog habitable planets, around 2200. The HS discovers Caliban-1, which is a Drift node between the Antioch and Francisco clusters, and sends xenobiologists. They do a poor job...”

“I’ve never met a xenobiologist who did a good job.”

“Haha, no, they’re competent, especially back then, but they botch the work because anti-entropy siphons their brains, they write a report that ends up forgotten because anti-entropy erases the data and the will to be interested, and the planet is so ignored that the League builds a bunch of orbital stations instead of founding a colony there, even though I’d bet anything it’s fully habitable.”

“I don’t even understand how such a report could exist. Anti-entropy seems like an incomprehensible and irresistible force.”

“Like all forces in the universe, it diminishes with spatial and temporal distance. Had our civilization emerged a million years earlier, we would have conquered that rock. But let’s move on. Let’s now take a small leap into the future, when David Ilsner is alive and a student at UniNox. He’s not a dumb guy, but far from being the David everyone knows. He’s promising. He’s passionate. He meets a brilliant mentor at the time ... Allonius? Something like that. He had a good influence on him.”

“Samuel Aloysius.”

“Okay ... I see you know everything. David remains a scatterbrained student. He chose UniNox not for its openness to Xeno sciences but for the adventure of the True Abyss, for freedom, and for the girls. In a world where machines are much more capable of providing pleasure than humans, he likes real sex, and I must admit he develops a real talent that no EV, alas, will ever capture in his bio.”

“The LEs ignore who David Ilsner is, and the Transients intercept all the smart ones who dare to search on the subject.”

“Well ... they were really scared then. Anyway, David also gets high; drugs circulate freely in the Abyss. LSD, Tybalt’s Matrix, Ultrapsi too, that damn thing that makes you think you’re dreaming when you’re awake and that you’re in reality when you’re dreaming. He gets, with a friend specialized in surgical AIs, a drug that has no name in the True Abyss ... data from the deepest and darkest corner of a planet given over to debauchery ... Cerebral fluid from a Booz Xeno, used by the Brotherhood of the Two Worlds.”

“The Owls?”

“You REALLY know everything, don’t you. Yeah ... legend has it that it gives flashes of the future before frying your brain, and that the Brotherhood uses it to avoid fleet raids. His friend doesn’t make it, but he survives. It develops his mind. He becomes brilliant, like a Renaissance genius, Leonardo da Vinci. But what’s cool is that he remains that arrogant jerk who loves to screw, and the whole made a pretty interesting cocktail as long as you didn’t spend too much time with him.

Burdened by his gigantic brain and equally large ego, he writes excellent reports on the cerebral extract, and the Stellar Fleet showers him with thalers. Unfortunately, the only exploitation of his work is of sinister memory. The Anti-Wau project.”

“What project?”

“Lodovico. The trial. The exile. The Transient at the judgment.”

“It’s on my list of facts to observe, but okay. Please continue.”

“Ah, these young people who forget the mistakes of the past. David leads his brilliant life, clears the Veritatis and many other scientific revolutions ... he and I meet and adore each other, but no more than two days a week. At night, he has flashes. He sees himself on planets, asteroids, moons unknown to him, but the visions are very real. He sends probes, thousands, he spends his entire fortune on them, guided by his intuition, and then he manages to locate the places in question. And when he goes there, he discovers something super strange. Will you believe me? Because it’s something a bit between him and me.”

“Yes, I will believe you.”

“They are always isolated planets, barely populated, without established civilizations. Each time, he discovers the same thing: a Xeno building. In the middle of nowhere. For no reason. Imagine a small Xeno church. Inside, an engraving. A few words, always the same. The buildings are copy-pasted on each planet. It’s written in an unknown language. We don’t know it yet, but it’s the stellar language, and there aren’t enough words to decipher it. But that’s not all. The Xeno houses disappear after a while. They deconstruct before his eyes. Before our eyes. I saw it.”

“Self-destruction?”

“No: the Travelers. The Xeno religion, does that mean anything to you? The Travelers are beings who travel from the future to the past. In fact, when we see something deconstructing, for them, whose time flows backward, they are building it, do you follow me?”

“They really exist then?”

“It wouldn’t be the most extraordinary thing in the universe. David discovers this and remains silent. Not because he’s afraid of the Transients - he wouldn’t have been able to make the connection at the time - but because he knows he’s on the discovery of the millennium and wants to announce everything at once, to become the king of the scientific world, intoxicated by his ego, which suffered a bit from the contempt of academics themselves hurt by his methods. His monstrous ego saved him. So he has this information, and then? He works on it.

You have to see that for almost eight hundred years, we haven’t had a geographical vision of interstellar space. For us, Prospero is connected to Escalus like a metro once connected one station to another, but geographically, Prospero is in a different spiral arm from Escalus, and there are millions of worlds between those two planets. David thinks outside the box and looks at a geographical map of the Travelers’ monuments. The relevant worlds formed the arms of a spiral scattered across millions of galaxies, all converging precisely toward Caliban-1.