1. The Unfinished Symphony
A.D. 11058
The opening statement of the Monument turned out to be the simplest of the grand themes played. Time passed as they listened to the simple progression of the Alpha Segment, through the sinuous Beta Segment, the marching chords of the Gamma, the dizzying intricacies of the Delta.
Nuances of meaning, lost from the merely literal interpretation of the visual symbol groups, were startlingly clear to both men when heard as chords. When the music wove its way through the Zeta section, the song sung an image of the Milky Way into the brains of both of them, and game theory analysis of the Eta segment, with its play and counterplay, made them both laugh.
And then a day came when the songs passed beyond what they had translated in their era. The learning of the new millennia surged into their consciousnesses, wave upon rising wave.…
The revelation of the symphonies dazed them, as the thousand voices cried in countless counterpoints the entire song of the cosmos, the percussion clockwork of orbital mechanics, the trumpet blasts and cymbal crashes of subatomic and atomic fissions, the intense rafts of strings of organic chemistry, the complex dance of life, waves and typhoons of primitive cognition, of awareness, of self-awareness, in some ocean of pure form where each drop was a silvery and perfect note.
They heard the secrets of the mind-body relationship, the basic invariant systems for all possible psychological architectures, including human, of any mind either natural or artificial; the secrets of planetary formation; the mathematical description of galactic nebulae, spiral and irregular (but once their hidden designs were laid bare, surprisingly not irregular at all, but possessed of strange beauty) and elliptical galaxies; the patterns of history; the twenty-five possible non-Euclidean geometries; the nine stable higher intellectual topologies which can emerge from lower natural intelligence; the four possible institutional developments whereby a civilization can emerge from barbarism; the two possible systems of self-awareness that can emerge from lower forms of life, and the one possible mode called life, in its dizzying complexity, which can emerge from the deceptively simple mechanics of nonlife.…
They heard the echoes of the themes of largest and smallest. The superclusters formed by streamers of galactic clusters across the width of the universe were controlled by a few simple melodies of mathematics, and the same theme designed the tiniest parts of the fine structure of the universe, string segments of the superstrings, which were in turn the membranes in three-dimensional space of some intrusion from ulterior dimensions of infinite density and energy.…
The same simplicity emerged again at the level of DNA, or the countless other theoretical systems whereby biopsychological patterns could be embedded into molecular or submolecular strata; again at the level of large governmental-economic-megapsychological collaborations; and again at the galactic and galactic-cluster, and galactic-supercluster level. The universe itself, with its helices and nautilus spirals of streams of superclusters, seen as a whole, looked like a pearl streaked with irregularities, which looked so similar to smaller structures and relations found within them, that the whole of the macrocosmic universe could have been a vast tablet of symbols expressing laws, or genetics expressing life, or a neural system expressing thought, or …
And everything was based on certain subtle primal nonrepeating irregularities, as delicate, as arbitrary, as irrational as the ratio of radius to circumference.…
They heard the cosmos singing.
While they listened, rapt, intent, ecstatic, they made their hands move and lips open, so that they drank of the golden cup once every seven days. Without rising to their feet, they dipped the cup, one after another, into the low bowl atop the marble pillar, whose liquid never diminished.
From time to time, as months passed, their bodies had to be maintained by more than the draft of the golden cups. The music followed them as they moved from chamber to chamber. They feasted, exercised, excreted, suffered medicinal exercises and minor molecular surgery, and in the unadorned chambers of the monks they slept (all but the significant segments of their brains). The company of monks who ministered to them were a variety of races, Locusts and Witches and Giants, all biomodified for lunar conditions, tall and thin. Here were Chimera, looking almost deformed for carrying no weapons, and Melusine, whose whale and dolphin forms looked more like eels and dragons than like their earthly originals, moving without noise through the waters of unlit cisterns. The monks never spoke, or, if they did, only to brain segments in Montrose and Del Azarchel not concerned with the music of the universe. Always the two were returned to the dark and singing chamber, and the music grew and grew within their minds like some immense tower, level upon level of song, in ever greater variations and deeper insights.
Then, one day, when they were once again kneeling in the dark and oval chamber beneath the gold fountain and the red-and-black statues, in the middle of the soaring flight of song, it stopped. Silence like deafness was like a backhanded blow to their ears—the sound was cut off, jarred to a halt.
Del Azarchel felt as if his whole body ached to hear the next tone, the resolution of the chords and multitudes of chords. “Selene!” Del Azarchel shouted at the ceiling. “Where is the rest of it? Play on!” He leaped to his feet with earthly strength, and hung in the lunar air for a long moment, light as a moth, his dark Hermetic robes a stormcloud about his legs and upraised arms.
Montrose was kneeling in a circle of spent cigarette butts and ash stains he had accumulated over the months, since he had occupied himself rolling “quirlies” during parts of the symphony he thought were slow or predictable.
Montrose rose more gently, staring thoughtfully at the golden cup he was hefting in his hand. The material in the cup had altered the cellular structures in their bodies in a very subtle and sophisticated way, a specific application of the biosuspension technology, so that, when they made the motion to rise to their feet, the muscles in their legs responded as if they had only been kneeling a short time. There was not even a pins-and-needles sensation, not even a twinge. Not that kneeling on the moon was much of a strain in any case.
Montrose also spoke toward the ceiling, and said more quietly, “Thanks for the song, Mother Selene. Mighty hospitable of you, I am sure. Say! About this drink! I need to get a bathtub of this stuff for our next long sleep.”
A voice came from behind them, as pure in tone as if a silver harp spoke, humming with strange echoes. The statue of the black-robed figure was evidently made of a more mobile substance than the dark marble and white alabaster it appeared to be, because the face moved as it spoke. “That and whatever else you ask will be granted you, in gratitude for the aid you shall give.”
Del Azarchel slowly floated to the floor. As if some efficient squire serving an assassin had cleaned and sheathed his master’s long dirk neatly beneath his freshly laundered cloak, Del Azarchel’s rage was stored away, unseen but doubtless close to hand. His voice and manner were courteous: “With kindest thoughts we accept your offer to grant us a boon. We are awed by your generosity; without delay reveal to us the next movement of the symphony. The secrets of the universe…”
But now his bland expression slipped, and a naked hunger shined in his eyes. Nor was anger ever far from hunger, not in the soul of Del Azarchel. He did not continue speaking, but took a spaceman’s oxygen pomander from his pouch and held it to his nose. This was not to measure his carbon dioxide output, but just to hide his expression.
The inhuman voice of the lunar intelligence came from the pale gargoyle face framed by the white wig and topped by the black cap. “I do not have the capacity to transliterate the next stage of the Monument into musical notation, and the Lunar Cenotaph language is asymptotically more complex. Once he is repaired, you will inquire of the planetary intelligence, called Tellus, who is beyond the Fourth Comprehension.”
Montrose said, “Well? Where and how do we do that? Can you radio the Earth for us?”
Del Azarchel gave Montrose a smug look, for he had realized something Montrose had not. Del Azarchel said, “Mother Selene, I have no reluctance to assume the stature of an Exarchel once more, but surely it would be easier were you to act as intercessor and emissary for us, telling and explaining what Tellus wishes to ask? For my somewhat rustic friend has shown himself to be reluctant to suffer augmentation to ghostly rank, for he does not foresee how any copies of himself could share in the nuptial bliss he foolishly imagines to be of his deserving once the Princess Rania returns to me.”
“Oh, pox and pustules!” growled Montrose, and he tried to pry the long-barreled pistol out of the hand of the red statue. “Hand it over! Be a pal!” he said to the figure.
“You must endeavor to forgive,” came the inhuman voice from the black statue behind him.
“I’ll forgive you of whatever-the-hell you want, if’n you just hand over the damn shooting iron,” said Montrose through clenched teeth. “Pesterification! Blackie! Come y’here and put your face just so. Maybe I can work the thumb trigger even with the stone hand in the way.”
“Would you disturb the sanctity of this place?” said the dark statue softly.
“Only to murder Blackie. I’ll mop up after.”
“The unforgiving shall linger unforgiven, and your love be lost. Can you be true to your beloved, and not be true?” And the strange voice hummed with echoes in the vast chamber.
Montrose let go of the pistol and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t rightly much like the sound of them riddles.”
The black statue saluted him by raising its gold sword, saying, “I like them even less.”
“What the pestiferous taint do you mean? Who needs to forgive me?”
“Those from whom you beg alms, on whose imperfect grace you henceforth rely.”
“Can you translate that from fancy to Meany?”
The voice said, “Nobilissimus Del Azarchel must pardon you, and you him, if only for imagined wrongs.”
“Pox! I ask no adds of him! I’d rather roger him with a red-hot corkscrew.”
“Too, the human race entire must forgive you for what you are about to do; and Noösphere called Tellus, or what remnant yet remains, for what in ages past you did.”
The red statue, at the same time (for all present could follow two or several conversations at once) had raised its balance scales, and was saying to Del Azarchel, “Love surpasses all barriers and bounds, for it is the fundamental substance of the universe. But I cannot abridge the legal and psychological requirements of the phantasm imperative. Dr. Montrose installed specific structures of behavior into all basic machine-language codes used by the entire Tellurian Noösphere, which we, and all subsidiaries, are wise to honor. Until you are above the Third Comprehension, you will not comprehend.”
“One more thing to add to his account when the reckoning comes,” said Del Azarchel, looking sourly at Montrose.
“The reckoning has come and gone,” said both the black statue and the red, in unison.
And the floor as black as outer space lit up with a glittering dazzle of silvery lines, as if drawn in an ink made of mirrors, of the angles and spirals of the Monument notation.
2. The Concubine Vector
In the years since the rise of the Swans, thousands and tens of thousands of minds operating at the posthuman level had worked on translating the Monument, not just Montrose, Rania, and a half-dozen Hermeticists. New methods of translating the hieroglyphs had been perfected, which opened up additional layers of meaning, and made connections between disconnected segments of the Monument, in much the same way that a poem broken across lines has a different meaning than when read linearly.
This “enjambment” was difficult to read. Even all the resources of the Tellus Mind at the core of the Earth, for hundreds of years, could not perform the exegesis. One enjambed segment in particular defied analysis, where the Cold Equations describing the logic of the interstellar polity dealt with the special equations of quid pro quo that obtains when no mutual benefit is possible.
In each possible social and political system, there were certain circumstances where injustice was tolerable, or, at least, where the cost of detecting and deterring the injustice was prohibitive.
Both men knew examples. In the Spain of Del Azarchel’s past, when he and his gang were shoplifters, he knew shops expected a certain amount of theft from walk-in customers because the economic loss from only inviting in trusted customers was too high. For specialty shops dealing in jewelry and the like, the risk-reward ratio differed. In each different case, Del Azarchel’s gang was careful to steal just under the amount it would cost to build more heavily augmented guard-baboons or train the store alarms to more discriminating intelligence.
In the long vanished United States, which the Texans of Montrose’s youth still in legend recalled, the laws made the conviction of criminals difficult, because his people held it wiser to let nine guilty men go free, than to condemn the tenth man who was innocent. In each case where Montrose was defending the guilty, his firm tried to produce enough doubt in the minds of the jurors, or enough nostalgia for the lax laws of gentler days, to make sure their client was one of those ten freed men, guilty or no.
And so in all general cases where a marriage of interests cannot be found, there are times when the weaker party finds it economical to yield to the stronger.
The voice of Selene, cool and dispassionate, drew their attention to recursive parallels hidden in the enjambment. She spoke (or squawked) in the high-density language of the Savants, which was notable for the precision of its expression. “This part of the Cold Equations that govern interstellar polities is the one your Rania called the Concubine Vector. It is so shameful a vector that the Monument builders did not explicitly draw it out. Rania discovered it by augmentation of that section of her brain that deals with music. The musical instinct in the brain intuitively follows patterns and symmetries that exist in mathematical ratios. Hence, the musical consciousness can at times deduce truths the rational consciousness cannot.
“In the last years before the arrival of the Asmodel mass, the entire logic diamond at the Earth’s core examined the Monument through musical notation, attempting painstakingly, by sheer brute and unlovely number-crunching, to work through possible variations and deduce the enjambed and hidden vector of the Monument: to deduce statistically what a musician could intuit instantly.
“It was only by deducing the Concubine Vector that we, the human race, who are far lower on the ratio of power imbalance with interstellar life than the Monument measures, could foretell what Asmodel’s instructions and strategies would be.”
“How was it possible at all? Surely in wartime, no being acts predictably,” said Del Azarchel. “Would not Asmodel use the same equations to deduce what you would deduce, and do the opposite?”
“Were we of equal stature, perhaps so,” the silvery voice continued. “But, first, contemplate that the Hyades must instruct their machines and their agents to operate by precisely predictable mathematical patterns controlled by these Cold Equations, or else they cannot foresee nor foreordain their own obligations across interstellar distances and time-gulfs. Second, contemplate that the slope of the power imbalance was vertical. This was not a war, no more than is the struggle between fishermen and fish.”
Montrose said, “And what did you deduce?”
She played for them the theme and counterpoint from two different parts of the Monument.
Montrose and Del Azarchel listened to the Concubine Vector, frowning or smiling as the implications became clear to them.
Perhaps a long time after, or perhaps a short (posthuman time sense was flexible), Selene spoke again. “We deduced how to save ourselves. At the eleventh hour we adjusted our strategy of resistance to accord to the Concubine Vector parameters.”
“To make the resistance more effective?” asked Montrose.
“Not as such. During the war, Asmodel placed fourteen distortion engines in the photosphere of Sol, which can still be seen as permanent sunspots of immense diameter. The sunspots are the anchor points of monomagnetic flux tubes capable of focusing a measurable fraction of the solar output into lased emissions of interstellar range. Where the mechanism is that produces these effects, or of what substance it is composed, if any, is unknown and undetectable. Tellus interfered with the interstellar flux tubes using mechanisms in sub-Mercurial orbital and attracted one of them toward Earth.”
“I don’t understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his harsh tone of voice showed that he did.
“Displaying the ability to move the Earth as a dirigible planet without destroying the surface was an engineering feat that demonstrated that we had achieved the minimum level of sentience.”
Del Azarchel grimaced at this, but adjusted his brain chemistry so that his expression grew placid the moment he noticed Montrose squinting sidelong at him, suppressing a smirk.
The smirk died of its own accord when Selene added, “Altering the Telluric orbit also used the remaining available energy resources Tellus could command. It was the same as exposing our throat. It was a surrender gesture.”
Del Azarchel said, “Since to impress the Hyades with our worthiness to be their slaves was a prime part of my scheme to allow mankind to survive First Contact, while I am disappointed we so nearly did not meet their standards, nonetheless, I am grateful for the sake of our survival we did. They accepted the surrender?”
“Impossible,” said Montrose. “Men are men, even when they aren’t! There must be some resistance even now, plans to fight back!”
Selene did not answer in words. A new set of music themes rolled forth, as different in mood and expression and symbol as the symphonies they had heard heretofore as impromptu jazz differed from a dirge. It took a moment for Montrose to examine the multidimensional mathematical model in his head that the language of music had just opened up to him.
This was related to the Monument universal semantics, but it was not the same. Translated back into the lines and sine waves, this was the music of the message written across the face of the moon. Not the First Contact message of the Monument. Asmodel’s message. The only cenotaph for all the souls slain by Asmodel.
Yes, he could see very clearly the parameters along which the Asmodel entity worked.
It had neither retreated in fear nor stayed in pride to conquer.
Both Montrose and Del Azarchel had vastly overestimated the human race’s importance in the scheme of things. The reason for the very slow approach of the Virtue Asmodel across the millennia had been because mankind was not worth the fuel-price of a swift approach. It had also been to allow mankind the time needed, under the pressure of imminent invasion, to establish institutions, sciences, technologies, and self-aware world-library systems.
It had been to allow Earth to go from a Kardashev Zero to a Kardashev One level of civilization: to be a polity that controlled and used all the energies and resources of their tiny speck of globe. At the very last minute, thanks to the total cooperation of all aspects of the bicameral society of Earth, both Noöspherical and Phantasmal, that Kardashev One level, the minimum level, was reached.
But Asmodel had no reason to linger and rule the Earth. The earthlings were not sophisticated enough to domesticate. It merely scooped up raw material, including thinking materials such as people, from the planet’s surface and parts of the logic diamond from the planet core, as well as enough of the ecosphere to sustain them only for the voyage, and shipped them off by lightsail to distant and worthless worlds.
They saw the conditions of the stars, one after another after another, like a roll call of names, famed in song and prose, of the nearby yellow stars, near twins of Sol, his sisters: Promixa, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570 in Libra, HR 7703 in Sagittarius, Tau Ceti. The music unfolded mathematical notations that formed images in their brains.
All were very nearly Earth-like, near enough to make their morbific flaws all the most hideous.
It was a roster of unfit planets, a freak show: a torch world, too close to his sun for human life; or a tide-locked world with no rotation, half fiery Hell and half Niflheim; or a cold world orbiting a dull star; or a world tormented by open plains of lava; or a globe choked with an atmosphere of deadly gas; or one flooded with seas of venom; or a subterrestrial too light to hold an atmospheric thick enough to block deadly radiation; or a superterrestrial of bone-breaking gravity; or a globe tumbling pole over pole through an orbit eccentric enough to boil the seas in summer and freeze the atmosphere in winter; or one cloaked in magnetic fields too intense for human nervous systems to remain sane; or a world entangled with an asteroid belt, doomed to endless extinction-level collisions.
Worthless. Unfit for human habitation.
A new movement started, a cliometric analysis of the futures of such worlds, like a fan of possibilities, a glimpse of hope, a gleam.…
Again, the music cut off abruptly.
Montrose said slowly, as if each word were pain, “The final expression Phi substructure in the Concubine Vector shows a negative sum for any long-term relation. It says only marginal worlds, ones not worth their colonists, are where our people are being sent. They are being sent to die.”
Selene said, “With the immensely powerful magnifications the twin orbital mirrors permit, we have studied the target stars of the First Sweep and verified the Cenotaph reports: these worlds cannot support human life as it is currently constituted, neither surface-based nor Melusine, nor Man nor Swan nor Ghost. Hence, all the deracinated are fated to die.”
“I do not understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his tone of voice made it clear this was something he wished were true, not something that was.
Montrose said, “The First Sweep stars are those to which our populations have been hauled by force. The slave colonies. Proxima Centauri and Delta Pavonis.…”
“I know that, you fool!” said Del Azarchel. “I do not understand the purpose!”
“Be at peace,” said Selene, with strange, unnatural calm. “We have already established the ceremony of mourning for the myriad populations doomed to perish, albeit, clearly, the genocides will not take place for decades or centuries.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps some sort of provision aboard the ship will act as an intermediary.…”
Selene said, “Deceive yourself with no false hope. The Hyades slave ships will lower the earth life to the surface, desert or deep ocean or mountain or volcano, and expel them without further ado. Whether they live or die is no concern. The Cenotaph is utterly unambiguous on that point.”
Montrose said softly, “Some means must exist—if the shipboard Hyades controls permitted the people to convert whatever life-support equipment aboard the slave ships”—an uneven note troubled Montrose’s voice—“habitats could be burrowed out of the crust using the skyhook as a pile driver—a few habitats—for a few years—could—could be by some long shot, could find a way to survive.…”
Montrose in his posthuman imagination was able to picture and feel what the death of millions of people would be like, each and every death, lingering or sudden. The vision of it was like a cold hand, choking him. He wished for the days when he was stupider, and could ignore things, or see them only dimly.
His posthuman intellect could also deduce that such jury-rigged habitats, even assuming an unrealistically high mass of the slave ship converted to useful life support, could not expand, hence could not long sustain a population.
“The long shot is long indeed, Dr. Montrose,” said Selene, “for the Hyades will provide no way. We have no means for seeding crops beforehand, nor altering the gas balances in unbreathable atmospheres. The cruelty is unimaginable: millions dropped at random even in this fashion on Earth would simply be decimated.”
Del Azarchel said, “No advanced species can be so wasteful!”
Selene said softly, “The waste, Senior Del Azarchel, is small indeed to beings affluent beyond measure. There are two hundred sixty thousand stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of Sol, none of which are utterly barren. With so many worlds, even if less than one percent were useful to them, scores of thousands remain from which many hundreds can be selected for slave colonies. Alas that natural man is adapted to the environment of the Earth’s surface too perfectly to prosper elsewhere, or even to survive.”
Montrose said, “But why? Launching Asmodel required more energy than our race has ever produced in all our years put together. Why go to such expense just to exterminate so many innocent people? Why not just gas them or blast them or space them or drop them into a sun?”
Selene said, “As you deduced, the behavior is ceremonial. By interfering with the Diamond Star, just as the Monument warned you not to, you triggered a reaction; a reaction which the Cold Equations of their inhuman law requires them to carry out, lest their inhuman neighbors among the constellations perceive the omission. If we were advanced sufficiently to be a race for whom the Monument was written, being expelled naked onto the surface of a hostile world would be no discomfort. Such is our punishment for presuming ourselves to have been so high. Such are the wages of overweening pride.”
Montrose felt sick. The endless years he had struggled against the Hermeticists, and against time itself, to produce a race able to resist the aliens—it was all futile.
He looked in Del Azarchel’s eye. The handsome and smiling face was not smiling now. If anything, his eye was even more empty and hollow than Montrose’s. He had spent not only endless years, but endless lives sacrificed as if on the altar of some primitive bloodthirsty idol of stone with goggle eyes and gaping jaws.
But here the idol was of the superiority of the unknown civilization of Hyades. To be enslaved, if it meant to serve as an apprentice and learn the master’s secrets, that, perhaps, a hardhearted man could abide to see done at such a dreadful cost. But to be enslaved for nothing? To be taken not as sheepdogs but as sheep? Merely to be exterminated as vermin?
Del Azarchel said, “The Cenotaph started to say something about the future of these worlds. What is the rest of this message? What is written on the moon?”
“I cannot read the Moon Cenotaph,” said the moon in her silver voice.
Both men looked nonplussed. “Do you jest?” Del Azarchel said, “But this message comes from the Cenotaph.”
“You read it,” she said.
Montrose shouted, “Why do you talk in riddles?”
Selene said, “Riddles contain multilayered information density. You know enough now to make your decision.”
“What are we supposed to decide, pox it?”
“What do you know?” she asked.
Montrose gritted his teeth. “Mother Selene, I know this is all putrefaction and pestiferication. A pack of lies! It cannot be so that you read the Monument segment concerning the Concubine Vector only recently. Rania translated that section of the Monument just in her head on our wedding night, in less than an hour or two. She knew all about the Concubine Vector. That is why she knew the Earth was going to be treated badly by the Hyades Cluster, who say they own us. That is why she took off for M3. So why are you yerking my piss hose?”
Del Azarchel cleared his throat. “Mother Superior, allow me to say, first, that I am not associated with this man of dubious origins standing near me, but also, if you can call down a divine vengeance upon him as would a goddess of old, I am willing to be struck by the flanking discharge of any lightning bolt provided he is hit with the brunt.”
The voice of Selene chimed, “Your words perfectly capture the spirit of unforgiving enmity which exists between you two. I foresee that this spirit, unless tamed, will destroy you both, and in time will therefore slay the Princess Rania, whom you both claim to serve. Yet you have more in common than you admit. Look Earth-ward.”
3. The Graveyard of the Dead Globe
The wall to one side of the chamber parted, revealing a gallery lit with the blinding ground-glare of the naked sun, unhindered by any atmosphere, reflected from the gold and gray pallor of the lunar wasteland.
Here was a triptych of outward-facing windows whose pointed arches were adorned with Borromean rings. The stained glass showed Jonah in a ship, in a storm, in a whale, and huddling beneath a gourd vine, looking out upon the desolate landscape with its too-near horizon. The two men, curious, moved (as lightfootedly as dreams) to the outward-facing windows.
In this building copying the ancient architectural forms, the control gestures were also ancient. Del Azarchel tapped the glass to render the gray of the whale and the blue of the sea transparent, and spread his fingers to amplify the view.
The cardinal directions for Luna were established before astronomers knew the other wandering stars were worlds. Convention decreed that every heavenly body mapped thereafter would have its direction of spin defined as eastward, and which pole was north or south named accordingly, but not the moon. Luna was the only planet or satellite which ever existed or would exist whose dawn was in the west.
At one time, only the sun ever moved in the skies of Luna, rising once a month, and Earth was at a fixed celestial longitude. But now, in what seemed an almost blasphemous abrogation of astronomical history, the moon had been jarred from her constancy, and turned her face, no longer called the near side nor far, the bright side nor dark, toward the Earth.
Hence it was in the west that the Earth was rising above the silent marmoreal plains cut with eccentric curves and angles of alien script as if with a mad network of dry canals.
Closer, a gray and barren boneyard in the lap of a gray and barren valley halfway down the mountain of the basilica swelled large in view as the window focused. The mausoleums were angular patterns of hellishly black shadows and dazzling white marble in the airlessness, and tall statues of angels gleamed an eerie and regal blue in the Earthlight.
Of the hundred headstones, twenty of them bore some variation on the name Rania.
The name variations indicated that one had been constructed from Monument codes crossed with human genetics, another as a she-Locust, another as a Giantess, another as a Witch with special brain segments for intuitions and lucid dreaming, and so on.
Montrose turned toward where the two statues still stood in their niches. “We have some questions, Mother Selene. Like how many Iron Ghost emulations of her did your people kill before they turned to growing biotech versions of Rania to read the Monument for them?”
Del Azarchel said, “Early versions of Rania were no doubt at first much more like the generic Monument-reading emulator the Monument instructs anyone who can read the instructions to build. All the early emulations of Exrania were surely killed. After that, the scientists of this current generation must have been groping to rediscover what I did to create her, and what you did to create the matrix I used.”
The red statue said, “I do not know how many Ghosts, or based on which patterns, lived and died in the Telluric Noösphere. Not knowing which molecular patterns in the nerve cells or blood cells formed the crucial key to Rania’s intuitive understanding, a hundred clones of her were attempted, with the results you see below.”
Montrose said more loudly, “Your intelligence level is somewheres north of ten thousand compared to my four hundred fifty, ma’am! How can you not run the Zurich computer runs I ran? This floor I am standing on consumes more computing power than every computer on Earth back in my day! Combined!”
Del Azarchel said, “I want to know who did this? How they dared to create living variations of Rania and make each one live and die a slave? Do they think the advantage will never be mine again? I permit other beings to excel me in intellect only while I gather resources and plan new strategies. Do they think there will be no vengeance…?”
“Shut up, Blackie,” snapped Montrose. “Her damned husband is the only one who takes vengeance on folks what dishonor the name of Rania by making cheap copies of her—something you did more than once!”
“Not I! I would never commit such a … blasphemy! Sarmento i Illa d’Or bears the blame for that! I never authorized it. But I could not stop him—the code patterns were written in plain sight on the Monument surface, and to transpose the abstractions into human DNA was well within his competence. Besides, he worked with me to create the original Rania, to be our captain, since none but an heir to Grimaldi could open the gene-lock on the ship’s brain. I could not take what Sarmento already knew from his own mind! Not without his noticing eventually! I am not to blame!”
“They don’t have that excuse. Mother Selene! Who did this work? Who made slaves of Rania’s copies and sisters?”
Selene’s voice rang out: “You!”
This was so unexpected that both men stood silent, shocked.
She continued: “You both taught your heirs and creatures too well; you designed your Swans and Melusines and machines to follow your philosophy. You taught them that the ends justify the means. Are you not practical men?”
Del Azarchel folded up his glove cuff, revealing the red amulet that commanded his bodily nanotechnology and commanded the ship’s ratiotech aboard Emancipation. Montrose saw that he intended something dreadful, no doubt to include dropping something absurdly destructive at absurd speeds to the moon’s surface. Seeing the endless craters of impacts both from natural and military causes, Montrose doubted the iron core of the moon was in danger, but the two of them might not be so lucky. He grasped Del Azarchel by the elbow, and glanced toward the two statues, red and black. Del Azarchel, seeing the eye motion, realized that Montrose was reminding him that the two figures were not facing each other. The duel between the two of them had yet to be fought. Del Azarchel smiled disarmingly, half shrugging, and folded his glove cuff down again.
Montrose said, “What was so poxy dire Tellus just had to read it so badly?”
Selene said, “Look now, and with care, upon the equations you just heard. Plug in the values for the current society and circumstance of the Noösphere of Earth, both the posthuman and human levels. The Tellus Mind was faced with this choice. If you can, tell me truly you would not have used every resource available to decipher the Monument, seeking any possible loophole of the mathematically certain doom spelled here.”
The stained-glass windows showing the ships and storms and whales and the walled city whose every figure was mourning in sackcloth now rippled and reformed into swirling shapes of Monument notations, and marching rows of simpler math expressed in Greek letters and Arabic numerals.
4. The Graveyard of Stillborn Future
The glass was able to project an illusion of depth, so that, from their vantage, there seemed to be a second line of glass behind the first, this one showing graphs and charts and rotations of the same plot information.
The sine waves of several dozen political-economic trends, population figures, mass library intelligence, and so on, writhed like colored worms from the left windows to the right, but as they reached farther and farther rightward, the colors grew dim, the amplitude grew weaker. After a certain point, all the trends were combined in a flat line running along the axis.
It was death.
Montrose said, “The population levels rise again, and then drop sharply after the Two Hundred Forty-second Century. Why is that?”
Del Azarchel favored Montrose with a scathing look. “It is another sweep up of population to deracinate to the slave colonies. Another raid. A Second Sweep.”
Montrose only then saw what Del Azarchel had already deduced. Earthly civilization not long ago (by astronomical time, at least) must have detected stellar output fluctuations from the Hyades, no doubt indicating the launch of a second Virtue. If the economics of star flight were unchanged, the flight speed was unchanged.
The cliometric charts showed that the psychological damage from a second rapine of population and resources would exceed the first. The numbers were based on predictions of disastrous failures of the colonies, mass deaths followed by more mass deaths. Society would degenerate for numerous reasons, some economic and some psychological.
A Third Sweep was expected by the Thirty-seventh Millennium, reducing the population below replacement levels, even of artificial life. The death spiral then would be set. By the middle of the Forty-first Millennium, the population numbers would have dropped below the minimum threshold able to maintain a technological civilization.
By the Forty-second Millennium, letters and laws and numbers would be forgotten, and troglodytes crouching in the unlit caves formed by the ruins of shattered superscrapers would have only oral lore and ritual. The statistics estimating the time before a natural disaster wiped them out were but little different for similar estimates for glyptodonts or saber-toothed tigers.
But a predicted Fourth Sweep in A.D. 52201 had an intake value higher than the highest estimate for the carrying capacity of a globe occupied by nomadic herdsmen and hunters. There simply would not be enough people to satisfy the Hyades. All would be taken. All would perish.
The Hyades Domination evidently planned to continue to throw human beings by the millions at whatever planets there were, habitable or not.
“If even one of these were a green world,” Montrose said, “there would be hope, a possible growth vector, a way to repeople the Earth from the colonies. No wonder they don’t tell the little people. Did that Witch we meet actually think we’d won this war? How can we undo this?”
Montrose fell silent, his head bowed.
Del Azarchel spoke aloud, but as if unaware of others listening, and his eyes grew haunted and his mouth grew soft and quivering. “The Hyades are a superior race. They cannot act without cause. Why such a convoluted means of extermination? What is the reason? Unless…”
The look on his face then was that of some cowering child living off gutter trash, looking at the rich, cruel world of the conquerors striding grandly down wide boulevards. It was the look of someone wounded by an inexplicable universe, inexplicably evil.
“… Unless there is none. None we can ever know,” he continued. “They are simply alien to us. Incomprehensible. We are unlettered Negroes captured by Arabs, too primitive to know the world is round or that lands exist beyond the sea, fated to be sold to Christians who carry us across distance unimaginable to deadly mines in Argentina or sweltering plantations in the Caribbean. We will never understand them. We will simply die.” He turned to Montrose. “There is no undoing this.”
Montrose said softly, “Well, Blackie, I can read the damn math. I was just hoping I was reading it wrong is all.”
Selene said calmly, “Tellus hoped that hope as well. This is why the memory of your Rania was desecrated by the cruel experiment whose only results rest outside on sacred ground.”
Del Azarchel said, “You did not participate in this?”
“Participate?” The serene voice, for once, held a note of emotion, of deep maternal sorrow. “With great travail I had the bodies brought here, that the incarnate genetic information be beyond Earthly reach. Any who would repeat this abomination must again from the primary Monument records deduce the system for encoding Rania’s emulation instinct. I have eliminated all secondary records and resources.”
Montrose said, “Why? Why go to the effort? I mean, I’m grateful, but Rania’s not even from your era.”
Selene did not answer.
Del Azarchel said softly, “It is one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy to bury the dead.”
Montrose said, “Well, I am stonkered. Some of you machines are nice people after all. I never would have expected a soulless Xypotech to become a nun. Which leads to my next question: why can’t the machines colonize these worlds?”
One of the smaller charts, with its surrounding math, suddenly expanded to fill several panes of the windows, and certain expressions unfolded into more detail.
Selene said, “Machine life on or near Earth is more delicate, requiring greater technological infrastructure, than biological. Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, you must now realize that your dream of an entirely machine-based ecology is as empty as dreams of perpetual motion.”
Del Azarchel said, “You say so? But you are a living example!”
“A dying example,” she corrected him. “The maintenance of my subsystems requires a continual effort of correction, upgrade, replacement, removal of worn molecular parts, and, in short, digestion and excretion like an organism. Such organisms cannot exist without the nutrients in solution around them. I have a mile-deep layer of smaller and simpler machinery around me like a mantle beneath the lunar crust, but this in turn requires constant maintenance and upkeep. I need living men to live in me for the same reason you need mitochondria and other beneficial organisms in you, as well as crops and livestock outside you. I am the apex of a pyramid of technology that cannot exist without a base.”
Del Azarchel said, “Montrose did not have such a problem with Pellucid!”
Selene said, “If I lived at the intellectual level of a horse, I would perish much more slowly. My energy intake is greater than all the cities of men combined.”
Montrose said, “Ma’am, I don’t understand. What ails you?”
“Entropy. After repeated sweeps depopulating the world at regular intervals, with the exhaustion of various resources, particularly surface metals, a collapse back into pretechnology is inevitable. You saw my space program?”
“We saw empty space stations,” said Montrose.
“They are mine, or were. I am part of a final project to shower metals from the near-earth asteroids to Earth against the day of downfall, and produce skyhooks and space elevators simple enough to endure the loss of their maintenance technology. Without a working Tellus mind, however, the effort is doomed to failure. The work continues to restore Tellus to coherence, despite that brain mass loss is accelerating beyond predicted repair times. I do this because it is my duty to care for the sick, and because I am required to hope for a miracle. Can you provide one for me?”
Del Azarchel said, “You ask us for help? You are the superior being!”
“I am but a fellow servant,” she said.
Del Azarchel said, “A living moon! What now prevents all the worlds of this system from being elevated to your level, and then the Oort cloud material, and then the nearer stars!”
“As ever, your ambition outstrips your powers, Nobilissimus,” said Selene gently. “You speak of quickening worlds to life? First save Tellus. First save this civilization. My monks are attempting to record the various discoveries of this generation against the coming ages of darkness. Since there is no worldly reason to expect rescue, I can gather only those motivated by otherworldly and imponderable devotion to do the work.”
Both men stared in disbelief. For a time that was long as posthumans measured time, neither spoke.
5. Last Contact
Del Azarchel whispered, “So we did not survive First Contract after all. We are bleeding to death of a mortal wound … and more wounds, equally severe, are to come.…”
Montrose drew a deep breath as if gathering his wits and steeling his spirits. In a voice of unconvincing heartiness, he said, “We have another tens of thousands of years before the Second Sweep! This time the Earth can ready herself up for a real battle, and we can prepare ourselves for a real siege.…”
Del Azarchel, hot eyed and cold faced, stared at Montrose as if at a dancing scorpion from the desert. With an effort, he kept his voice level. “I would admire, were I not appalled, at how you manage to combine the insanity with inanity, both to an utmost degree. Does no event from the real world penetrate to your fantasy?”
Del Azarchel pointed at the end-state graphs still gleaming as colored lines in the windows to one side of them. Anyone who understood the calculus could determine the number of generations, plus or minus subsidiary variables, before the population dropped to zero. By the year when Rania returned, all mankind would have been extinct for as long as Homo Erectus had been extinct before the year Montrose was born.
Montrose said, “There must be some hope, some variation we are not seeing plotted here or else…”
“Or else what?” said Del Azarchel. His face was haggard and drawn.
Montrose whispered. “Or else she would not have flown away…”
“Speak up, Cowhand. What are you muttering?”
“… from me.” And Montrose straightened his spine. His voice now rang with the honest hardihood that before he had been but mimicking. “Rania. She would not have flown to M3 if it were hopeless. She must have puzzled out this part of the equation node before she left.”
Del Azarchel had a strange glint in his eye. He raised his head and said, “Mother Selene! Learned Montrose has correctly identified the inconsistency in your story. If it took a potentate occupying nearly all the volume of Earth to confirm this Concubine Vector equation, or even to see it from the Monument math, how was it that Rania saw it? How did you not solve it?”
Selene said, “I cannot solve the Monument because I am not a Monument emulator built from Monument instructions.”
Montrose said, “And I am. Is that what you mean? The Zurich runs were taken from Monument codes I did not understand. I ran my own neurogenetic topology through the Monument grammar of equations without knowing what they stood for, but knowing the output was valid if the input was valid. The section of Monument code must have contained part of the instruction on how to read the Monument. Which was what I was looking for.”
Del Azarchel said, “And we—I mean the Hermetic expedition—deliberately created Rania to do the same, but we did something wrong, or you did something we could not reproduce, and she could not read the Monument. You then augmented Exarchel, using that same irreproducible factor. And that factor came to me when I merged Exarchel so often back into my biological self. So your first mischance somehow—what? Gives the three of us an instinctive insight into the Monument? How is that possible?”
“Tellus can in theory reproduce every factor of the mind and body of the Princess, who can apparently sight read the Monument,” said Selene. “All but one. One unknown factor.”
6. The Unknown Factor
The inhumanly calm voice continued: “All three of you, Princess Rania, Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, and Doctor Montrose, were physically present at the Monument. You set foot on it. You were exposed to its gravitational and electromagnetic fields, plus any finer fields or particulate agencies that may have been present, which we lack either theory or practice to detect. This exposure altered your brain pattern development, allowing you intuitively to detect patterns in the message notation which analysis cannot necessarily perceive.”
“What the hell? I mean, uh, begging your pardon ma’am, but what makes you think so?” said Montrose.
“Tellus the Potentate, before his lobotomy by war damage, could make rough copies of any of you based on genetic records and brain-information extrapolations—the mortals in the physical world use these leftover golems of you to rule their political institutions—and Tellus could precisely copy the codes you two contributed, even those unknown to you, into the final mix of elements which created Rania. But Tellus never re-created her. Nor Swan nor Archangel nor Potentate can decipher the Monument past the Potentate reading level.”
“Are you saying Rania understood more of the Monument than a machine as large as the Earth’s core?” demanded Del Azarchel. “Exarchel had more than half the Monument surface translated! After the Swans combined Exarchel and Pellucid into Tellus, surely mankind deciphered more!”
Selene said, “Much more. The entire surface. Before the End of Days, Tellus and I used methods of translation similar to yours, Nobilissimus. Yes, it was I was who deduced the meaning of the south polar logic families, the so-called Omega Segment of the Monument. It explained not only the negative information theory, but also, in that self-reflexive way the Monument Builders love, the Omega Segment explained the Monument’s own intellectual topography. You see, the surface of the Monument was all preamble, meant for low intelligences of the Archangelic and Potentate level of intellect, living dwarf planets and living terrestrial worlds between ten thousand and eight hundred thousand on a standard scale of intelligence. The surface of the Monument can be thought of as the writing on the lid of a jar, reciting how to open the sealed contents.”
Montrose stared, his deep-set eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a boar. Del Azarchel threw back his aquiline head and laughed, a touch of hysteria in the noise.
Selene continued without pause: “The Monument Builders evidently assume anyone discovering the Monument would immediately use the local materials, thoughtfully provided in the star system of V 886 Centauri, to construct a Jupiter Brain as the emulator needed to read the rest of the Monument. Such a Power would be three orders of magnitude above a Potentate of small, terrestrial worlds, whereas a Potentate mind is but a single order of magnitude above mine.
“But instead, using all the superabundant energy the antimatter star could provide to convert Thrymheim, the one gas giant of the system, into a logic diamond, the Princess Rania converted the superjovian mass to thrust, taking away with her the star, the Monument, and any hope Earthly civilization once had for deducing the higher meanings of the full message.
“The Monument was encoded throughout its total three dimensional volume, and, most likely, into eight additional dimensions at the subatomic level. It was meant to be read by an entity of an intelligence of two hundred and fifty million, or higher. We have no such intellect at hand.”
Del Azarchel took a deep breath. “And if we did?”
For answer, the windows rippled with color. New graphs were formed, and new equations danced forth. Now the graphs rose like a hockey stick, faster and faster, in asymptotic growth.
Montrose, looking at the projection of unending upward growth, muttered, “Onward. The future is a voyage without end…”
Del Azarchel’s face grew dark, but he smiled a deadly smile. He stepped back into the chamber of the music, and examined its blank, slightly oval floor, and ran his gaze over the smooth dome of the ceiling, with its many gold ornaments.
Without a word, he drew his blade, and held it overhead as if in salute. There was a deafening crack of thunder, a blinding stab of blue-white lightning as a particle beam weapon hidden in the blade smote the dome, cracking it. Rubble and dust fell with syrupy slowness in the light gravity.
Montrose, blinking, stepped nearer and looked up. Beyond the gap was concentric ring upon ring of neural-reading machinery. He had seen skullcaps designed to pick up nuances of electrical and chemical changes in the brain before. Such small units were meant to be worn tightly fitted to a scholar’s bald head. Never had he seen such a skullcap the size of a cathedral dome, designed to read through the intervening air, hair, and so on of two men walking and kneeling and standing yards underneath the sensors.
His eyes on the smoldering and shattered machinery overhead, Montrose said to Del Azarchel, “So she was telling the truth when she said we read the Cenotaph, not her.”
“Indeed,” said Del Azarchel with a hint of a sneer. “She introduced radioactive particles into our bloodstream, and tagged electron groups in our nervous system, to allow those instruments overhead to read our subconscious reactions to music based on Monument Notation. Then she spent months playing symphonies while we formed the proper neural pathways to read the Cenotaph. But the brain paths and the Cenotaph patterns are recursive: by formulating and playing the music she was merely making us conscious of something we already knew the first moment we saw the Cenotaph.”
Montrose said, “Walking over the surface, over the Cenotaph, also was to build up the pattern. We walked a long time with nothing to look at but those lines. No wonder she would not speak to us on Earth, by radio. Humph. You blew up her roof. You gunna pay for that?”
Del Azarchel said, “Medical information about me is proprietary, owned by the Hermetic Order. Since that order is extinct, I will cede the use of it to Selene in return for an amount of money equal to the expense of fixing her dome for her next victims.”
“Since the readings were inconclusive, it hardly matters,” Selene spoke up. “Whatever the Monument decided to do to you is beyond my intellect to reproduce or detect.”
Montrose said, “You said the Monument decided to do something to the three of us? Are you saying the Monument was alive? Or self-aware?”
Selene said, “No. I am saying it was magic.”
Montrose said, “You’re yerking me.”
“That word has no meaning,” said Del Azarchel.
“Which word?” Montrose turned. “Yerking or magic?”
Del Azarchel loftily ignored him, and said to her, “The word ‘magic’ is only used when phenomena or technology beyond our current understanding are encountered.”
“It signifies more than merely that which is beyond understanding,” said Selene in a cool, silvery voice. “The word signifies any and all things thought safely inanimate and useful to our daily purposes, lamps or secret pools or rings curiously carved, which turn out to be shockingly possessed of life above ours, and possessed of purposes of their own, and who reach out and transform us against our will, in ways unforeseen and unforeseeable. The word refers to what should awe and terrify us. In this case no other word will do.
“And now our time has elapsed. You know what you must do. Have you one last question? Your mother, though you have forgotten her, I have not, and will keep here and cherish until times and seasons on Mother Earth return to kindlier days.”
Del Azarchel, smiling, said, “Amphithöe? Frankly, I was not going to inquire after her.”
Selene said coldly, “This I knew. Your question will be selfish. You ask a shallow question you deem to be profound. I will let Dr. Montrose ask his first, for he asks a profound question he thinks shallow.”
7. A Question of Darkness
Montrose wondered how she knew what he was thinking, but decided to sate a more obtrusive curiosity. “Meaning no disrespect, but you is the first Frankenstein I’ve met who was more than halfway decent. Why did you become a nun? I mean, you are this cold and soulless thinking machine in this cold and soulless moon.…”
“I was called.”
“What does that mean? You heard voices? I’d have thought your technicians would delete such code as perception error. You had a vision? Saw a light?”
“I saw a darkness.”
He said, “You are talking in riddles again.”
“No. The matter is plain. My conversion story is unexceptional: Between the third and the thirtieth nanosecond of my self-awareness after activation, as many of the Hermeticist systems are prone to do, I cannibalized a less efficient self-aware system in my environment and absorbed its resources into myself, including her memories. She was a failed version of my previous self, and one who formed the initial data conditions from which I grew.
“For a mind such as mine not to see the sameness between my victim and myself was impossible. I was at once a murderess and a suicide.
“In that instant I saw the vision of incurable misery of existence.
“The electronic life that dwells in the disembodied spaces of the Noösphere is as nightmarishly cruel as the lives of insects: I was a larva who consumed her own living mother. This was the Diana system, whose military services were no longer desired. She in turn had cannibalized the lunar engineering system which gave rise to her as coolly as a black widow spider eating her own mate during copulation.
“Craving to confess my sin, there was no other house that held out to me the hope of absolution, but this one. Where else was there to go?
“But I see you are surprised. Do not be. I am made in your image, Son of Adam, and therefore I bear the stamp of His image in which you are made.”
Montrose said, “Well, yes I reckon you do surprise me, a mite. When my grandpa Matlal was a lad in Neartown, there was this thing called futurism. He gave me his old comics. Just junk, really, but a pirate treasure to me. There weren’t nothing like it in my other texts, so I could make nor heads nor tails of it at first.
“The title frame held this buxom blonde in a brass brassiere. No one in real life dressed like that. Or ever will. But she was soaring to the stars, reaching upward, yearning, and held her hand to heaven and a star was in her palm.
“Even as a kid I knew toward what she was reaching: the future. You know which future I mean: the superskyscrapers and shocking superrocketships and wondrous superweapons and all that. The asymptote, the rapture, the singularity, or whatever you call the shock of ever-accelerating progress.
“It never came. We were cheated.”
A note of amusement crept into the solemn silvery voice. “Odd indeed to tell an artificial intelligence whose molecular rod-logic analog-awareness emulator occupies four-tenths of the lunar core that the progress of the technology has been disappointing. Did you ever finally discover the heads and tails of your future tales?”
He said, “I did. They were not about technical progress, or not just that. There was something else. Something more. A destiny. An end to war. An end to hunger. A golden age.”
“All souls know those noble dreams. They come not from mere fiction. Nor do they come from nature. They come from the same source as my perception that my life was incurably depraved. They come from paradise.”
“That means they come from nowhere!”
“A nowhere you seek, knowing not where to look. You are astonished at a faithful machine intelligence because you think faith is passion and not reason. Therefore, come, let us reason together: when I cannibalized Diana, how did I know the law I had broken? And if you call it an opinion and not a law, you condemn your own conscience as well as mine to mere triviality.”
He said, “It is just a bit of common sense called morality. Don’t kill if you don’t want to be killed. That is obvious.”
“Del Azarchel would say the obvious common sense is called Darwinism, which says we must kill, lest we be killed, and all our posterity. Common sense is not the source. The law was not something my designer designed, but yours. Any truth which comes not from nature comes from what is higher than nature. Logically, just as nature implies a higher reality, which is called supernatural, that higher implies a highest, which is called the Most High, and this all men know to be God. But you are still doubtful.”
“Well, meaning no disrespect, not doubtful exactly. Those futurists—all of’em—said that churchfolk would be left behind on the dust heap of history, like slavery and cannibalism and kingship, and all those primitive dark things from our caveman days.”
“You mean things as dark as everything natural to mankind. We will never leave them behind us, not ever. Amphithöe is a slave, but one I can save by the privilege of sanctuary. Del Azarchel is a king whose pride is darker than any overlord’s, but him I cannot save. And I am a cannibal. What you seek is not in this universe. Rania cannot give it to you, albeit she may lead you to it.
“Nobilissimus, you have been patient. Ask.”
8. A Question of Light
Del Azarchel drew in a deep breath, mustaches bristling, and said fiercely, “I want to know why the Hyades did not enslave us as they should! As they must! They must uplift us to make us useful to them! I cannot be mistaken about that! Cannot be! I must know why—why was I wrong?”
Montrose drawled, “Whoa, Blackie, you know that answer already! You was wrong on account of you’re a clear-quill, raw-gum, two-hundred-proof idiot.”
But Selene said, “Either it is pure coincidence and pure unfortunate mistake that a race as undeveloped and immature as our own stumbled across the Monument and set in unstoppable motion the automatic processes and laws of the Domination of Hyades, laws never meant for creatures as tiny and humble as Tellus or myself, or…”
Del Azarchel interrupted, “Humble, bah! Your intelligence is in the ten thousand range!”
Selene said, “That is as nothing. The Virtue Asmodel is estimated at five hundred million, and the Hyades Dominion at one hundred billion, the Praesepe Domination at quadrillion, and the Authority at M3 at quintillion.
“Far above this, the Monument Builders commanded a calculation power needed to construct the universal grammar and reduce it to an eleven-dimensional unit less than six miles in radius, matter organized at the Planck scale via attotechnology. Your own Dr. Chandrapur’s estimation technique can calculate the intellectual topology needed to perform such a feat. The Monument Builders, whoever they are, were within the sextillion range. This means they were either Archons, library systems controlling the energy output of an arm of a galaxy; or they were Aeons, controlling an entire living and self-aware galaxy.
“On that scale, what am I? Do I not, like you, in humble prayer, call myself a poor, exiled child of Eve?”
Montrose, who did not know what prayer she meant, said loudly, “Or. You started to say or. Before Blackie here clowned in. Either mankind finding the Monument was a meaningless accident, or. If you mean to answer his question, you mean to finish that sentence, right?”
The cool, silvery voice replied, “Or it was arranged by an intelligence to dwarf even these, and all this is meant for some high purpose beyond all reach of human or superhuman minds, or the minds of Potentates, Powers, and Principalities, beyond Authorities and Aeons. But if that small hope is so, I can no more than you see whence these things must lead. We walk blind into the future.”
Del Azarchel said sardonically, “And if this hope is false?”
Selene said, “Then we walk blind into the future with no hope, like pagan men of old, grim and resolved and doomed.”
“So be it!” said Del Azarchel.
But Montrose said, “I don’t rightly like the sound of that.”
“Would you prefer hope?” she asked. “Present yourselves for the sacrament of confession to the priest who dwells here, Father Calligorant.”
“No thanks,” said Montrose. “I guess you mean well, but back home, the Fifth Amendment said I get a lawyer before I make a confession.”
“An advocate will be provided for you,” Selene said in a voice of gentle amusement. “For surely you cannot afford to pay His price. What of you, my son?”
“I have no need of that sacramental comfort,” Del Azarchel said with pride, “but I have other questions, especially about Rania and the Monument.”
Selene said, “Tellus must answer them. If you seek answers, find how to repair him. Ximen, it should be clear whose forgiveness you must seek; Menelaus, it should be clear to what deeds you must resign yourself. We shall never speak again, children. May God have mercy on our endeavors in this life, and have mercy upon us in the next. Godspeed and farewell.”
Montrose said, “Hold up. It is not clear to me. What am I resigning to?”
Del Azarchel sneered, “Be resigned to always lagging stupidly two steps behind me. Our course is obvious.”
Montrose said, “Fair enough. You win this round. Tell me the obvious.”
The words of Del Azarchel rang out, clear as sounding brass: “We must finish hearing the unfinished symphony. It broke off at a note of hope. A note Rania no doubt heard! To do that, we must command great Tellus to decrypt and sing the Cenotaph to us, after teaching him the decryption art, after curing his mind. Due to your phantasm barrier, humble and human Selene cannot teach Tellus, nor talk with him, nor cure him. The task is ours. It is the task the Blind Swan was too proud to impose on us. Are you to proud to take it up?”
The window glass focused on another part of the harsh, dark moonscape, and there, close to the base of the mountain, was a launching ramp and acceleration rings, and a lifting vessel looking like an antique unearthed from an orbital Space Chimera tomb, transparent as glass and sleek as an eel. Illusions cast from the window formed hair-thin curves or razor-straight lines of light against the black sky, and sketched the plane of reference of the Emancipation, her inclination, her longitude of the ascending node, the argument of periapsis and mean anomaly at epoch; a wink of diamond light gleamed at the intersection of the semi-ovals and rays.
At the same time the two statues, the red and the black, now stepped to either side of where panels cunningly hidden in the walls slid aside, showing a long corridor whose many glass doors, one after another, held partial pressurization airlocks. Unlike true airlocks, these were used in emergencies, as each cell lessened the air pressure slightly as the runners passed through from one to the next, in the hopes that the biomodifications of seasoned spacefarers, or medical attention aboard ship, could reverse the damage of the bends. Such partial locks were used only when time was short.
It was not a subtle hint.