Arch/Eternal - Prologue

Rita Freeman makes her case

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

---

Arch/Eternal - Prologue

Rita Freeman sat in her favorite chair in her favorite office, and tried to reread a passage from her favorite book. 

Tried and failed.

The book was a collection of essays by Emmanual Kant that had been dogeared within an inch of its life. The chair — a marvel of artistic engineering — shifted and morphed silently under her, mechanically adapting to the way she sat up to look out at the Dodurran city she called home. This was the place she loved most in the whole galaxy.

Her office was terraced like a treehouse, with a physical library on one end, high up, joined to a meeting area with a table that looked as though it had grown from the floor. Further down, her wide desk, aesthetically similar to the table, and then again up from there, another section with a few more chairs, and some amenities integrated so seamlessly as to be effectively hidden from view.  

Wide windows embraced her desk, and the lounge above it, and were constructed of zero-refraction glass, so that there appeared to be sections of the wall that were simply missing, to reveal the vast constructions of this province beyond. The people here built at a scale that could scarcely be imagined back on Earth. Their buildings reached high into the sky, and laced together into even vaster structures — many of them forms with no function but beauty.

Even now, Rita watched a weather system flow through a spray of gracefully tangled filaments in the distance, each of them hundreds of meters in diameter and thousands of kilometers in length. Even forrested mountains, dotted with towns of their own, had been reshaped to fit into the overall design. As lightning sprouted from a fist of dark clouds, it melted away into the enormous artifice, where its energy would be stored until it was needed. 

The library and the few walls close to her desk were packed with books and documents she had collected over the course of her life. All the data they contained was stored safely in the Fellowship’s datasphere, but there was a magic to the objects themselves. Something ineffible, irreducable.

She’d commissioned this place many decades ago after her decision to make Dodurro her primary place of residence. The pace of the people here, particularly those who occupied The  Academy — her translation — was gentle, and deliberate. They were a race of monkish scholars and artists, with a cultural commitment to aesthetic beauty that bordered on religious. Her reputation had earned her a place among them.

Rita set Kant on a table nearby and strolled around her office, by turns perusing her books and watching the storm out the window. 

She was waiting for a call that would tell her whether her request had been granted. She expected it would. Her contributions to the Fellowship were not in question. But she also knew that The Three Archs would have guessed her designs in meeting with them, and she could in turn anticipate their objections. No matter how often she reviewed the logic of her proposal, it couldn’t survive the counterarguments she raised in her efforts to play Arch-advocate. It was like losing to yourself in a game of chess. Maddening. 

The truth of it was that she had no way to be certain how they would respond until she had made her case to them directly. 

Not that she took any personal risk. If the Three turned her down, she would go on as before, studying, writing, contributing to the Fellowship’s body of wisdom. 

But what about Earth? As much as she loved Dodurro, some significant part of her heart would always belong to her backward little homeworld, with all its fractious, angry people, blithely unaware of their sheltered status in the grand galactic conflict that had been raging since before Earth’s human beings had ventured out of their wet, dark caves.

Once again, Rita silently, compulsively litigated her arguments in front of an imaginary tribunal of the demi-gods who held Earth in their anti-interventionist stewardship. Until, finally, a pale square rose out of her desk and hung there. 

As she walked over to it, she noticed that the storm outside had become quite violent. None of its noise could penetrate the inside of her office, but the spectacle was something. She swiped open the glowing square, leaving only two lines of text — a time, and a place. 

***

Rita left her office through a broad puzzle-door, which smoothly pieced apart into pillars on either side, allowing her to pass. In the unlikely event of an emergency, a simple depression of the pattern with her palm would have instantly removed it. But the slow morphology was a deliberate feature of its design. 

Her office was at the end of a long corridor that branched into a wide thoroughfare. As she walked, she passed a number of Dodurroa, some of whom she could greet by name. Despite their preference for muted tunics, they were a comely race, only slightly smaller than the humans on Earth, due to their marginally higher gravity. 

Along the thoroughfare, hundreds of whorls and bends rose and fell into rooms and meetingspaces, blind alleys and hidden corridors. Thanks to ubiquitous AR-assisted pathfinding, there was never any danger of getting lost, which gave architects immense liberty in the design of spaces that would have otherwise been torturous to navigate. 

Rita made her way along the straightest path possible to a large concourse, and boarded a small pod that closed tight and dipped into a hidden travelstream that would take her all the way to a terminal reserved for private spacecraft. 

***

Guided by the encrypted instructions contained in the original message, her ship used a gate path that was unfamiliar to her, and brought her to a place of exquisite strangeness.

The path terminated at a gate in orbit around a planet-sized sphere that in turn orbited a fierce yellow sun. With the help of her ship’s senses, Rita could see that the planetoid-object was only about half the size of Earth’s Moon.

But it was not a planet, and it was not a moon. As she watched its deep black surface bubble with a kaleidoscopic array of bright concentric circles, she guessed it must be some kind of machine, the purpose of which would likely remain a mystery to her until she died.

Such were the ways of the Archs.

Her ship didn’t land on the surface of that sphere, but rather upon a translucent, continent-wide band of glass that belted it at an immense altitude. When it had come to rest, her ship assured her that the atmosphere outside possessed all the requisite characteristics for safety and comfort. It seemed extremely likely that this had been done for her benefit, just as the dimming of the huge yellow star that burned dangerously so dangerously close.

When she left the familiar confines of her ship (which was appointed in such a way that it was more or less an extension of her beloved office), she found herself standing on that dark glass band, looking down at the blurred light of those roiling colors far below.

Why had they brought her here? Trust. It was easier for them to bring someone to them for a conversation than it was to condescend to the crowds, so to speak. People had a tendency to become…unpredictable when the Firstborn appeared. 

She wondered whether the air she breathed would disappear if she walked too far in one direction. She wondered if her skin and body would boil away to the radiation that must bathe this entire area.

Of course, it was also possible that this entire synthetic world and its mind-boggling ring were perfectly hospitable. That the entire thing was wrapped in an envelope of breathable air and haloed by magnetic fields to shield off the deadly radiation of space. Possible, but unlikely. The Archs themselves certainly had no need of such amenities.

Speaking of whom…

She noticed a brightening beneath her feet. And then, in a sudden surge upward, the brightening emerged from the translucent ground, and what looked like a being of pure light was standing before her.

She had started to squint before the its light dimmed. She knew it was a challenge for the Archs to tune their presence to others. Without great care, their brightbodies could instantly vaporize Rita where she stood. Instead, they attended to the physical cues of the mere mortals around them, and made adjustments accordingly.

Rita felt his voice before she heard it, and recognized it as Morning’s. He was using the ground as a conduit for communication. Another careful, difficult effort.

“Hello, Rita Freeman,” he said. 

“Hello, Morning.” She spoke out loud, knowing she would be understood.

“You’ve been busy.”

She shrugged. “I’m fortunate to do the work I do.”

“Which suits you to it. We are honored to have allies such as yourself.”

“I only hope to do more.” She got to the point — it was best not to hedge with gods. “I believe it is time to revisit intervention-by-proxy on Earth.”

“Oh?”

“The people there are at a critical inflection point. They ride the razor’s edge between failure and transcendence. They need you. Your influence. I have come to believe that without it, they will become a failed world, and the Fellowship’s long protection will have been in vain. But with your help, via a qualified surrogate, Earth could become an invaluable ally and asset in our effort to resist the growing dominance of the Confederacy.”

She took a breath. She’d rehearsed that opening speech a hundred times, but she was sure Morning could tell she was trembling. However often the Archs reminded them of their right to free expression, the prospect of freely expressing an actual suggestion to them was intimidating. It felt like insane hubris. 

But, she reminded herself, they were far from omniscient, or omnipotent. They were not actually gods, no matter how godlike they appeared. Their embrace of their own fallibility, as well as their insistence on open discourse, earned them the loyalty of countless worlds in the Fellowship. 

“You know why we do not interfere,” Morning said. 

“But you’ve done it before. At other crucial moments. We’ve gotten as far as we have only with the help you’ve given us.”

“That…is not certain. Humans everywhere are volatile and contentious. Some worlds tame themselves, and some do not. Despite your very good work, we do not believe you have found conclusive evidence that our influence has ever been the deciding factor in that progression. On the contrary, we have found intervention to be quite devastating on insufficiently tamed worlds. You know this. You have studied some of those histories.”

“Yes, I understand. But no two cases are the same. It is an imprecise, chaotic science — no. It is not a science, it is an art. To choose when and how to act, to help even one other person. To attempt to influence even one person’s actions for the better. At the scale of an entire world, it is infinitely harder than art. It is faith.”

Rita stopped herself. This was not the pitch she had prepared. She had intended to lay out more evidence with meticulous care. But standing here in front of this being of light, this curious demi-god of knowledge and generosity, she saw the absurdity of relying on the logic of her arguments. 

Because at its very heart, her plea defied its own logic. Transcended it.

“You have that faith,” Morning said. 

“Yes,” Rita said, stripped bare in truth.

“You know the perils of faith. Perhaps better than many.”

She swallowed. “I do. But I also know that it is only by faith that the greatest work can be done. Earth needs my faith. And it needs yours. Now. In this generation.”

The silence that stretched after her words was not built of time but of portent. Rita could feel the space between heartbeats, and her mind lifted into the contemplation that swallowed them both, fragile human and exalted Arch, as equals. 

This was…what was this? This created sharing? This invitation to silent communion? 

Gratitude. Morning was accepting her faith as a gift, absorbing it into himself. 

And then the silence ended, as it were a dream, and Rita’s heart beat again, and Morning said, “Find a proxy, and we will test our faith.”

---

Since this is a novel in progress, any and all feedback is earnestly welcome. My goal is to finish this book early next year. You can help me make it better:

Continue to Chapter One…