The Architect of Aeons

Their launch window allowed a rendezvous with the NTL Emancipation, but the aspect was unfavorable, and the transit long. From the surface of the moon, it was one hundred sixty hours, nearly a month, before they achieved the high, translunar orbit occupied by their mighty ship.

As before, Montrose spied on Del Azarchel’s stargazing. Whether it was serious research or idle pastime, he could not tell. Unlike before, Del Azarchel’s data path went through the communication laser, to the Emancipation, to the elaborate astronomy houses fore and amidships there, which used the immense vastness of the sails to gather starlight from the edge of the universe, and then to the ship’s ratiotech core for analysis, which was carried back to Blackie on return signal.

Ten thousand lightyears from Earth, he saw the turbulence in the Great Nebula in Carina the Keel, where powerful radiation and strong interstellar winds from a phalanx of massive and hypermassive stars were creating havoc in the storms of gas and dust. Here were young stars, each in its vortex like the eye of a hurricane, drawing in the cloudy matter and screaming out their radio noise, newborns uttering their first cries.

For the first time, Montrose suspected he glimpsed what Del Azarchel sought. The motions of these clouds exhibited the same patterns of slow expansions and contractions which he had previously seen in the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Great Nebula material was consuming the fogbanks of faint interstellar material issuing from its neighbors. What did the patterns represent?

Now the eyes of Del Azarchel turned toward views some thirteen million lightyears away, far across the intergalactic night. Here a giant elliptical galaxy in Centaurus, NGC 5128, was colliding with its spiral neighbor and absorbing it. Countless stars were being born in the violence. Jets and lobes of X-ray and radio emission issued far out into the intergalactic void from the highly active core of the merging galaxy, where a supermassive black hole burned at its heart.

Montrose forgot Del Azarchel, over whose shoulder he looked, fascinated at the crash and crescendo of cosmic violence. He goggled at the vision of the colliding spiral galaxy pair NGC 3808A and B like bright whirlpools of fire unwinding each other. He gaped at the burning nebula of Arp 81, remnant of a pair of spiral galaxies which had collided one hundred million years ago. He stared at the Mice Galaxies NGC 4676 and Arp 242, connected by a tidal bridge of stars, but leaving long tidal tails of wandering stars far behind them as they merged. He gasped at Mayall’s Object, and he saw the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 with its relativistic jet.

But the most astonishing and violent sight he saw was the object called ESO 593-IG 008: it was the fusion of two massive spiral galaxies and a third irregular galaxy in an astonishing triple collision.

Montrose saw Seyfert galaxies shooting vast jets of matter into the intergalactic night at half lightspeed or more; and he saw interacting pairs of ring galaxies, and saw oddly shaped three-armed spirals and one-armed spirals and galaxies with detached segments and companions no science of astronomy as yet had explained. They seemed somehow like battle-scarred veterans to him, maimed and halt.

The disembodied and posthuman intellect of Menelaus Montrose, his frozen form free of physical distractions and his senses bathed in data streams issuing from instruments far more potent than human eyes, soon became lost among the wonder of the stars.

Farther he looked, and further he reached, eager for wonders, drunk on starlight.

The galaxies were grouped in clusters, and the clusters into superclusters. And there were things larger than superclusters: the gravitationally bound galaxies formed complexes of massive, thread-like structures fifty to eighty megaparsecs long: filaments of galaxies, Great Walls of galaxies. And the vast, empty spaces tens and hundred of megaparsecs wide, where no walls of superclusters reached, and no cluster ventured, and only a few isolated sparks of galaxies floated like lost embers, were the Great Voids.

He drew his eyes and instruments closer to home, and noted, not without wonder, the relative motion of the Andromeda Galaxy, closest large neighbor to the Milky Way. The two galaxies were on a collision course, and would merge in less than three billion years.

Montrose was so absorbed that it came as a shock to him when a message, smuggled by Del Azarchel backward through the repeater Montrose had been using to spy on him, emitted a low chuckle, and formed a message.

Well, Cowhand, would you care to check my work? I have been waiting patiently for you to volunteer. Surely you care about the result?

Montrose sent back a noncommittal reply, the electronic equivalent of a grunt. He was too proud to admit that after so long a period of observation, he had not figured out what Del Azarchel was seeking.

Del Azarchel no doubt guessed his thought. He opened a voice channel and sent wryly, “Come, is this also not clear to you? Must I spell out everything? The Monument Mathematics contains the skeleton of a Universal Grammar, a philosophical language which translates all possible forms of encoding thought into all other forms. I have been looking at the natural astronomical phenomena as if they contained encoded messages written by an alien intelligence. I have been examining the patterns in the stars.”

Montrose responded with voice signals. It was easier than sending text or Monument code, and he could add a nonchalant note to show how little he cared. “Blackie, if you think the stars spell out a message just for you, that you can read with your secret decoder ring, I think it is time to check your skull for divarication errors.…”

“Or check the stars. Check variations in the motions of stars, nebula, and gas clouds, their growth and decay rates, the periods when stars go nova, everything. When I analyze it by Monument algorithms, a certain pattern emerges.”

“The language of nature. As I said, physics is merely a metaphorical means of speaking that unmelodic music we call speech, whose metaphors are very precise and crisp and colorless. I have been reading the scroll of nature, hearing the voice of creation.”

“I found the voice was out of tune. Nothing exactly matches the Monument’s given model of how the clockwork universe should be working. Some stars are out of place. Some are too dim. Many galaxies are not in the locations they should be if gravity were a constant and operated by the rules of Einstein. There is something changing the stars.”

“Activity. Energy expenditures. Collisions. Something is reaching between the galaxies and creating similar patterns of stars going dark, or going nova. There are too many Population I stars, young stars of heavy elements, and too few Population III stars, older stars of low metallic content. There are too many planets, more than can be accounted for. The streams of dust and nebulae are disturbed. It is as if … almost as if…”

Del Azarchel said solemnly. “Old friend, you and I both put faith the Monument formal symbolism, the logoglyphs and mathematical codes. We thought the Monument Builders had discovered the universal syntax, the absolute langauge, the ratios and expressions that described both matter and energy, time and space, mind and body, and the evolutionary patterns of everything from atom to abstractions. Half by providence and half by design, both of us each in his own way altered his nervous system at a deep level to encode those notation ratios into us. We are partial Monument emulators, just as Rania is. We both put absolute faith in the Monument.”

“Things are not where they should be if the laws of nature are as they should be and everything were evolving as nature directs. There should be fewer novas, far fewer supernovae. And those supernovae should be found grouped together, as one triggers the next. There should be no pulsars at all, no quasars. There are too many spiral galaxies for natural processes to account for. There should be no Great Attractor in the Virgo Supercluster, none of these long threadlike strands of superclusters, woven of clusters of galaxies, reaching in long bridges across the macrocosmic void. What if…”

As Del Azarchel spoke, he also opened his files for Montrose to inspect. Montrose said nothing, letting the figures and logic symbols dance in their grave waltz through the several layers of his mind.

Come to think of it, had he not himself been noticing the odd violence among the stars? Had he not had a hunch that the star furnaces in Carina or the galactic collisions beyond Alphecca were the handiwork of titans? Montrose was slightly peeved that Blackie had acted on the same hunch and analyzed it mathematically, while Montrose merely gawked and stared.

Montrose interrupted. “What if what? Someone is herding the superclusters to build a bridge? Setting off supernovas like firecrackers? Is that what you are saying?”

Del Azarchel transmitted a laugh of relief. “No. Good heavens, what a concept! I was thinking something more realistic and more terrible. What if the Monument is wrong? The math does not reflect reality? This notation we have built into our brains, and written into the base-level machine language of all our xypotechnology, ghosts and angels and archangels and potentates—it is all false to facts. What if our picture of the universe is radically wrong?”

Del Azarchel said, “How? Use your imagination. Our nervous systems and computer systems do not let us see reality as it is. Our perceptions filter that reality as surely as the phantasm filter you inflicted on Exarchel. It is not reality that forms our logic assumptions, but our evolved mental architecture. We live in a world where it is possible to divide by zero, and pi is a rational number, but our brains cannot accept it, and so we don’t see it.”

Montrose was taken aback. Finally he said, “If the Monument is wrong, maybe it is wrong about everything. Maybe the cliometry is wrong. Maybe Earth is not doomed. Maybe the slave ships will not dump millions of helpless people into freezing and burning hell worlds to die. Maybe the word ‘maybe’ is the mule of a mayfly that mates with a bee.”

“So are you. The Hyades use this math for all their doings. It is good enough for them to maintain an interstellar empire. If the math is wrong, they are insane.”

“Insane enough to devote thousands of years and endless fortunes of energy to slay myriad men in an utterly pointless fashion?”

“Well, like you said, Blackie. This math is built into our brains and minds. If the Hyades are crazy, so are we.”

Montrose realized that it was purely on faith of something she saw in the Monument, something which, apparently, even Selene could not see, which sent Rania on her quest to M3 in Canes Venatici, beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers had never detected signs of life in that remote globular cluster, no signals of civilization. There was no assurance that there would even be an authority to hear her plea in the remote millennium when she arrived. There was only the word of the Monument.

In the forward instruments grew the image of the Emancipation. Even with her sails folded, and external cabins deflated, the interstellar vehicle was a sea serpent larger than Leviathan, and the lifting vessel a glass minnow waltzing up to kiss her nose. As if in celebration, the noise of maneuvering jets popped and spat like firecrackers, ringing through the cabin of the lifting vessel. Both men were suited up again, as was the spacer’s tradition during any close approach, and sealed their air hoods.

The popping noise of maneuvering jets shut off suddenly. By a tradition as old as space travel, the vessel with lower mass was supposed to match the velocity and other orbital elements of the larger to save on mutual fuel. But somehow the titanic spire of the Emancipation had her nose within inches of the flyby position, and gave a single short lightning-flash of her titanic altitude jets, so that the two vessels came smoothly together with hardly a jar.

“Something is wrong,” said Montrose. “The mating was too smooth.” But his airhood mike was off, so he did not send the voice signal to Del Azarchel.

Del Azarchel swam into the airlock first. The inner valve opened immediately, as if the nose cabin of the Emancipation was already perfectly matched with the interior conditions of the lifting vessel.

“Wrong,” muttered Montrose to himself. “When did the ship’s brain confirm a nanomachinery match between the two air systems? All these motes and crap humans put in our air, mutations and miscalculations when they misrepair themselves have to be checked.…” He knew there was not enough calculation power aboard the ship for this.

Del Azarchel stopped moving halfway through the rubbery ring of the airlock. Montrose saw a strange red light splashed around the interior, gleaming from the metal clasps of Del Azarchel’s dark shipsuit and bright cape.

The interior of the Emancipation was glistering with a reddish light, the color of an ember that refused to die. Rivulets of diamond like the delta of a river or a fantastic spray of icicles gleamed from the surfaces surrounding any logic ports in the bulkhead.

Both men headed hand-after-hand down the flexible corridor-tubes inward toward the axis of the ship. The tubes thoughtfully expanded to accommodate their bulk, and cilia protruding from the tube walls like many whiskers hurried them along their way.

The drop down the esophagus of the tube was not dizzying after three days in zero gee, despite the lack of a visual horizon. The tube disgorged them into the axis of the shroud house, the longest of several long bays that extended fore and aft beyond sight. The logic diamond at the core of the ship had expanded, sending out odd growths in fractal patterns like sea coral or the limbs of barnacle-crusted kragens. Heat and light shed from the diamond core indicated furious activity in the ship’s brain. This was the source of the sullen red light.

Montrose sent a directed microwave pulse to Del Azarchel: “Did you do this? We had a deal! We agreed to keep the ship’s brain as a ratiotech, limited intelligence. Not awake. It was when you were sending all that data to the astronomy house, wasn’t it? You sent a signal to trigger a by-his-bootstraps uplift of the ship’s brain from ratiotech to xypotechnic self-awareness. The ship grew smart enough that she was no longer a phantasm to the Tellus Mind.”

Del Azarchel merely pointed at the blank bulkhead. Realizing Del Azarchel was pointing at something beyond the hull, Montrose switched his goggles to the simulated image of the ship. Through the surface of the imaginary hull, and in the readouts shining on the insides of his goggles, Montrose saw that the stern sail was directed at Earth and the circuits were warm. The through-path monitor in the ship’s spine showed the activity log: an immense amount of data from Earth had downloaded itself by itself into the ship’s circuit, unhindered by defenses and firewalls and physical gaps, and somehow wrote itself into the core of the ship’s brain.

Montrose said, “This ghost did not force his way aboard. You invited him. You broke the deal. I thought you were a bastard but an honest bastard, someone too proud to lie.”

“What lie? I invited him into my half of the ship. He merely trespassed into yours. I suppose you could complain to him, but—thanks to you—he cannot hear you unless you augment yourself.”

Montrose uttered an anatomically unlikely and grotesquely unsanitary imperative.

Del Azarchel replied in a voice of icy calm, “Must I again tell you what must be done? With Rania absent, you and I alone have an instinctive architectural algorithm in our subconscious minds for emulating Monument structures. It is a decryption key. Once we make xypotech emulations of ourselves, a newborn Extrose and a reborn Exarchel, we can copy the key into this ghost and transmit the result back to Earth. That should be effortless, since we know the Monument Builders would have wanted the key to be open to any mind reading the Monument.”

“You have it backward. The Monument Builders did not want the message to be open to the reader. They wanted the reader to be open to the message. And it is not a message but a mesmeric spell. Selene told us. Magic is what mutates you.”

“The Monument Builders alter the mind of whoever reads the Monument,” said Montrose. “It is buried in the subconscious because it is a secret message.”

“Secret?” said Del Azarchel. “Absurd! The whole point of a First Contact message is to be as clear as possible to as many alien biopsychologies as possible! The Hyades were announcing their possession of our planet and all of the Local Interstellar Cloud…”

Montrose said, “The Hyades did not build the Monument. Consider how much work Tellus had to do to figure out how to surrender, and how little work I had to do to read their battle plans and invasion date. If Hyades had written it, that would have been reversed.”

“Hell, Blackie, you read the blueprints for their skyhooks written there. Their fighting machines. Is that the kind of thing anyone shows someone you plan to invade?”

Del Azarchel was speechless. For a mind of his speed, a half-second of silence was like being dumbfounded for half a minute.

“There is no information about the Monument Builders anywhere in the messages or maps or legal equations or anything. No signature. Not the slightest clue. Or maybe one clue: whoever secretly towed the positive matter gas giant Thrymheim into orbit around a negative matter star is a different group from Hyades, or whoever openly placed that star there. The Monument Builders do not want to make contact with us, first or any,” Montrose said with emphasis. “No, Blackie. The Monument was meant for something else.”

On the visual channel, Montrose could see Del Azarchel’s face from his inner mask camera. For perhaps the first time in thousands of years, Del Azarchel was wearing a look of honest curiosity on his face, the look a man gets only when speaking with his equals, hearing some new thoughts about his own area of expertise from another expert.

And perhaps there was a sneaking glint of admiration for Montrose hidden in the expression. He said only: “Meant for what?”

On the visual channel, the expression metamorphosed into Del Azarchel’s wonted look to disdainful calm. He had regained his self-possession; his face once more was a mask. But his voice still betrayed an echo of awed curiosity. “But why? To what end?”

“If we survive,” said Del Azarchel wryly, once more his cold and smiling self. “Time flies. Shall we get on with it? I have centuries of practice at savantry, whereas you are unnaturally reluctant to make a copy of your brain. Afraid of going mad again, are we? Afraid of being two people? I will be happy to handle the matter myself, without your aid.”

Del Azarchel now flexed his cable to pull him the other way across the vast width of the axis chamber. Montrose called up a transparent overlay. He saw where, at some point in time not reflected on the ship’s growth chart (for its cabins and chambers were continuously being rebuilt and replaced over the decades and centuries), Del Azarchel had installed a savant chamber for brain-to-xypotech uploading. Montrose could not tell if this had been done in the three days since leaving the moon, or years before.

Del Azarchel slid away, light as a fish in the zero gravity, passing one bulkhead after another, heading for the savantry chamber. “You hesitate, even now? The kenosis of Tellus buried in the crystal is even now waiting for us to become visible to him, so we can talk. If all those colonists die, is not Rania’s mission in vain? Are we not proved by events to be too shortsighted, too parochial, too savage, too foolish to be a starfaring race—too damned stupid for the—?”

At that point, the voice line was cut. Montrose looked through pinpoint cameras in the bulkhead and saw that Del Azarchel had pressurized the savantry chamber and taken off his air hood. The chamber was cylindrical, with a surgical cocoon opened wide like a strange white rose made of antiseptic blood-absorption pads on one end, and a cluster of scalpels, bone saws, intravenous feeds like the teeth of a shark ringing the rim of the brain surgery helmet at the other. The Spaniard was smiling, and his breath came in clouds from his white teeth. The atmosphere in the chamber had not had time to warm up to life-support standards, and Del Azarchel might not bother powering up the heating circuits, since temperatures too cold for bacteria to thrive might be more sterile.

But he knew what Del Azarchel had said after the line was off. Too damned stupid for the stars.

Montrose muttered a set of imprecations involving rotting diseases and reproductive organs as he pulled himself hand over hand to an unoccupied bay, and selected from the design templates to build a savantry chamber of his own. He set the three-dimensional lathes and molecular printer tubs to work. It would take hours to prepare the chamber for brain surgery.

He had time to kill. So Montrose went aft to the Physical Therapy Bay, inflated it, pumped in air and heat and light, doffed his shipsuit, and spent the time tethered to a zero-gee punching bag, driving roundhouses and uppercuts and snap-kicks into the leathery bag, and bouncing like a yo-yo on the end of his elastic tether with each blow. The anger in him slowly subsided as if departing with his concentric clouds of sweat.

The first thing he remembered after the confusion and delirium had passed was a sense of shame. How could I have been so pestiferous jackassularish stupid?

Dreams had overwhelmed him, image after image. Glowing figures crowned with light bent over a dark well at whose bottom stars were shining; Rania winged like an angel and soaring; swarms of dark, angular creatures picking their way, crablike, across spiderwebs strung between star and star; a screaming queen chained to a sea cliff, and at her feet the jaws of a sea monster running with salt water, the nostrils in its skull blowing steam; his dry-eyed and hard-eyed mother talking to the photograph of his father; a burning house whose sparks spread from garden to wood to field and grassland, until all the world between the sea and sky was a mass of beating inferno, roaring and red, and black ash below and black smoke above conquered all the continents, halted only at the verge of the steaming sea.

One dream held images of Del Azarchel and Rania moving men on a chessboard, and Del Azarchel, with a smile, tossing chessmen one after another into the path of the enemy queen, tempting her into a position far from the central squares of the board. Except that the chessboard was the silver lines and jet-black expanse of the Monument, curves and angles of alien mathematical codes.

A second dream-image showed Menelaus stepping (without his pants) into the salon of some Hindi or Blondy gentleman’s club. Del Azarchel was wearing white tie and tails, seated in a wingback chair, his head bent close to the superhuman and regal figure dressed in emeralds and sea-blue silk and crowned with a circle of clouds. The two were whispering together. When Menelaus, naked, stepped into the suddenly silent room, he realized the regal figure was horse from the waist down.

The cloud-crowned figure arose. His goateed face was a match for Del Azarchel’s. Montrose recognized the dappled flanks and white socks of his horse, Res Ipsa, on whose template Pellucid had been based. He stood with his front hoof resting lightly on the North Pole of Earth’s globe, with her ocean-covered poles and the new shapes of continents, hanging between a dark circle and a bright, symbols of the orbital mirrors.

“Pellucid…?” Montrose whispered the name, and then winced at the note of absurd hope in his voice.

“Ah,” said Del Azarchel, standing from his chair. “At last the Cowhand wakes. Physically, we are near Jupiter. Mentally, we are occupying the same logic diamond, which has grown to fill most of the ship, occupied by a kenosis, a downloaded version, of Tellus. You slept for over twelve months.”

“Is this real?” Montrose either asked aloud or thought silently. The dream image was cartoonish and flat. At the same time, Montrose was aware of another level of his mind, the level where the dream-images were being compiled.

Another dream-image came: he saw a mansion of many rooms and corridors, wings and colonnaded walks, enclosed sunny courtyards where mirror-basined fountains lofted plumes of foam to sprinkle ranks and hedges and mazes of rosebush, while above rose towers and observatories. But the walls and floors were of clear glass. To either side were library stacks of books, tomes, librums, scrolls, grimoires, enchiridions, over which monks toiled with pen and ink. The stacks descended stair beneath stair and ladder beneath ladder into a subterranean vastness. Through floors like clouds he could see in the lower basements where hidden and antic gnomes were toiling; and torture chambers where men with his big-nosed gargoyle face screamed. Meanwhile, in the towers above, other men, also wearing his face, paced the balconies and counted the stars, and all the towers were wrapped in opium smoke that issued from athanors and alchemical furnaces.

The mansion was his mind; the torture chambers his buried guilt and fear; the workshops of gnomes were the subconscious processes usurping all his attention, the attempts of the mind to encode the jarring maelstrom of raw sense data into images and forms his emotions and his reason could comprehend.

“The question of reality is often over-pondered,” said Del Azarchel heavily, his voice coming from another scene. “I have erected a sensorium to accommodate your virtual sense impressions, until such time, assuming you can manage it, you pass beyond the need for concrete visualizations. But wait—you are not seeing what I am presenting? The virtual brainwave patterns of your virtual brain show you are still in REM sleep.”

One of the gnomes handed him an alarm clock. It was another image, a reminder of the time when he heard a fire alarm or screaming maiden in a dream, and woke to find himself clubbing his alarm clock with the folding baton he slept with under his pillow. (That was before he learned to sleep with his alarm clock parked across the room.) The gnome was merely an image meant to show him the situation: the virtual reality Del Azarchel offered was being interpreted or misinterpreted through the subconscious layers of his mind.

It was a simple matter to turn like a swimmer in the ocean of his thoughts and crash through to the surface. He drew a breath and found the air was missing. Del Azarchel was not running any false sensations of the mouth and nose, or even of the body at all. The simulation was merely a set of screens containing various information. One of them was a cartoon image of Del Azarchel’s facial expressions. Another showed several viewpoints around the ship, including his body in one medical coffin and Del Azarchel’s resting in another.

Montrose turned to thank the gnome, but it explained that it was merely a dream image as well. “I am not quite awake yet. Where am I? Are there two of me, or one? Is that me?”

The version of his mind in the ship’s brain made a cartoon arm to point at the image he saw of himself in the medical coffin. His mind seemed to have no location.

Of course, minds never really had location, but Montrose was comfortable with imagining himself an inch or two behind his own eyes, staring out as if through windows. Now, he had no sense of front or back, up or down. It made him seasick. Then he saw that his inner ear was a virtual simulation, a set of numbers describing the motions of his nervous system and connected glands and organs, so he could shut off the neural sensation of dizziness.

“You are still half-asleep,” said Del Azarchel, with the hint of an impatient sigh, but also, from another aural channel, the hint of a dry chuckle of amusement. Not being limited to one voice box, he could make any noises he wished to communicate anything he wished. “I would shock you awake, but Tellus will not allow me.”

Montrose saw the interface controlling his coffin, saw the neural and chemical balances, and ordered the coffin to inject him with just enough of a stimulant to wake him.

But wait—how could he be there when he was here? There was a copy of his mind in the ship’s brain, but a biological copy still inside his skull in his head in his coffin. Then he saw the thick helmet of golden-red logic crystal surrounding his now-bald head, and saw the bones of his skull had been replaced by a substance transparent to various useful frequencies, even if it were opaque to normal vision. He saw the continual information flow passing from the smaller human brain into the larger virtual brain. At the moment, both brains were synchronized.

In his present state, it seemed a long time for the biological nervous system to react to the stimulant. He saw his eyes open in the coffin. He also saw—with those eyes—nothing but darkness. He waved his hand at the internal coffin controls to bring up the inside lights, but before the nerve impulse traveled from brain to hand, he realized it was easier merely to retool various areas of the crystal hemisphere now crowning his head to light-sensitive appliances. His vision was more precise and covered more bands of the electromagnetic spectrum than his eyes, and also encountered the odd sensation of looking at the inside of the coffin in front of his nose, to either side of his ears, above the top of his head, as well as inspecting the surface of the hard pillow on which his head rested.

Rested? The coffin was in a small inflatable bay clinging to the inside of the main carousel, which was under power, and spinning him and the room about roughly half a gravity. The human body was not designed to rest and recuperate in free fall, despite the clever modifications made to Elder bodies. Someone had thoughtfully moved him to a chamber with weight.

Montrose climbed out of the coffin, put a bag to his mouth and nose, and spewed up the fluid in his lungs and stomach.

“That is what sleep is for, I suppose,” Montrose answered himself using speakers built into the overhead. For a moment, he was confused, because again he was watching himself from the outside, through medical sensors and pinpoint cameras on the bulkhead.

Had he been talking to himself, or was this a case of the two halves of himself talking to each other?

Through the crystal floor of the imaginary mansion of his mind or minds, he could see the information feeds writing the subconscious and conscious memories from the point of view of the extended computer-self, Extrose, into his biological brain using the same nerve signals a normal human brain uses to modify itself, and also writing the memories of his biological point of view into the computerized cell-by-cell simulation of his brain occupying a locationless address inside the vast logic diamond now occupying the axis.

He had three choices. First, he could sever the connection between himself and his ghost in the computer. The drawback to that was the divarication which drove so many Hermeticists mad. The biological brain acted as a governor or correcting censor. Second, he could maintain the connection through the nerve jack and brain umbilicus. This would limit him to this chamber, and, with extension cords, to other locations on the carousel. Third, he could try to maintain contact between his selves by means of signals sent to and from the living helmet grown into his skull. The drawback to that was waste heat: too much signal concentration would fry his biological brain. It would get hot wherever he went.

The mind of Montrose was differently organized than it had been. The subconscious activity was clear to him, at least down to a certain level. He saw what the dreams meant. The image of Del Azarchel and Tellus straightening up from their talk in the gentleman’s lounge was merely a visualization of the thousand clues from computer logs and waste heat patterns in the ship’s logic crystal showing that the two had been talking while he slept, occupying a mind-to-mind communion for the months while the Emancipation sailed from Earth to the outer system and Jupiter. Talking behind his back.

He saw what his memories meant. The reason why his mother would never play the soundtrack connected to his father’s portrait was simple and silly. Father had a thick hillbilly accent. She did not want her children to pick up that low-class no-account way of talking. It should have been obvious to Montrose even back when he was a man. Now that he was a Ghost, only now that she was dead and lost as the Pharaohs of antiquity, did he see and understand the old woman’s fears. Only now did he see how fiercely she had loved, and defied her family and lost her inheritance to marry a proud Texan wintergardener. It was a whole lifetime of unspoken tragedy, and he had missed all the clues. That brought tears to his eyes.

He saw a dozen times Rania had outsmarted or manipulated him, drawing him subtly to the conclusions she had planned him to have and planted in his path. That brought a pang of doubt to his heart.

And that pang of doubt brought a stronger pang of shame: hadn’t his mother been smarter than his father, smart enough not to get herself killed by the same duelist who killed his father? Smart enough to avenge her husband’s murder without getting caught?

So what right did he have to doubt Rania even for a tenth of a second at any point in the tens of thousand of years separating her from him? To doubt her love? Was not love greater than any span of years?

He saw now that there had been no chance of overcoming the Hyades by military means, no matter whether biological life was joined into the Noösphere of Earth or not. If the Virtue men called Asmodel had for any reason failed, the cost of that failure would have been added to the debt of Earthly life, and a second expedition, larger and more well-equipped, would have followed before another ten millennia had turned. Certain clues in the mathematics spelled it out.

He saw also that he could have befriended the Hermeticists, the minions of Del Azarchel, and won their loyalty away from him—merely by augmenting their intelligence. Del Azarchel had deceived and manipulated them, played on their weaknesses, even back when he had been a mere mortal in Space Camp with them.

And more than that, Montrose also saw how Del Azarchel had paid back the men who had followed, loved, and obeyed him. Now it was blindingly clear.

Between A.D. 2410 and A.D. 2510, during the Cryonarch and the Ecclesiarch periods, all but five of the Hermeticists had died in augmentation experiments, destroying their own minds in one vain attempt after another to do to themselves what Montrose had done to himself.

Now he saw from countless tiny clues leaping together into a pattern in his mind how Del Azarchel had caused those experiments to fail. Del Azarchel through Exarchel had corrupted data runs, caused impurities to be introduced into neurochemicals, and had hidden crucial clues from the Hermeticists that might have saved their sanity and lives.

How could the sixty-seventh Hermeticist step over the corpses of sixty-six others to jam the same needle in his brain which had killed all his predecessors? How could he be so proud and blind, so hungry for the superhuman intellect they so worshiped? There was the example of Montrose before them, cured of his insanity by Rania. Then they saw Del Azarchel successfully achieve augmented intelligence, through Exarchel. And Del Azarchel beckoned them on, encouraging them, whispering that the errors made by inferior and bungling predecessors would not be made by them, no, not by them. Their brains and theirs alone were stable and sane enough to survive the shock. Were not the Hermetic Order superior to a mere Texas Cowboy with bad grammar?

With those lies and whispers, Del Azarchel had murdered them all. He had spared only the five whom he trusted to oversee the creation of the five races which were to be used in the creation of the Jupiter Brain.

Montrose could have saved all seventy-two, turned them against Del Azarchel, and spared the world all the pain of the last nine millennia, if only he had known then, if only he had seen.

It was too far in the past for the anger to be anything but dull and remote. It was too late for anything but regret.

Del Azarchel shrugged. “What is that to me? We have been about more important things. We translated the Cenotaph while you were sleeping.”

“The three of us. Crewman Fifty-one helped me. Yes, you lapsed back into your old habits. Folding a paper makes it weaker along the seam; it tends to fold again there, you know. Ah! It brought back memories! We had a year to work out the problem, and your brain was unoccupied by conscious thoughts, so, why not? I assumed you would not mind, not to save my princess, and if you did mind, what could you do? Shoot me? Challenge me to a duel?”

“She will not be yours if no civilization is here to greet her when she returns. To be a starfaring civilization, we must do what starfarers do: establish colonies; maintain communication and commerce; adapt the human race to new environments; reengineer worlds to suit ourselves. It will take millennia, or hundreds of millennia.

“Yet, to them”—Del Azarchel was grinning, and his eyes glinted like agates—“such spans of time are merely as the passing hours of a day, all these nearby stars merely a handful of sand. What are twenty grains out of a beach? What are threescore stars out of a galaxy one hundred twenty thousand lightyears wide, holding two hundred billion?”

“Checkmate, Cowhand. I finally understand what Selene was telling me to resign myself to do.”

“What is it?” Montrose could not suppress rage and hate like boiling darkness in his mind. He was seeing this man, clearly, with the crystal clarity of Potentate level thinking, for the first time. “What is so hard for you?”

Del Azarchel spoke in the same strangled tone of voice, as if smothering hysterical laughter. “After all this time, I and all my dreams are at your mercy, and yet I know you will not sacrifice your queen to stop my king. Didn’t you once tell me our match was a chess game and not a fencing duel? It seems you were right. I cannot but smile, seeing your struggle not to let the unthinkable thought seep into your brain. Tellus and I spoke while you slept. We translated the Cenotaph. It had instructions on how to…”

Del Azarchel nodded, grinning. “He cured himself. I merely downloaded a copy of myself into him in an advisory capacity. Something like an advocate for human affairs.”

“In less than a year? And that means that the aliens do not take twenty thousand years to grow their Jupiter Brains. Asmodel detected your work at Jupiter’s core. So the Cenotaph describes a method of how to wake up Jupiter in a reasonable time. Asmodel wants us to wake him up, doesn’t he? That cannot be good for us.”

“You mourn the birth of Jupiter, our man-made god?” Del Azarchel said malignantly, “You should bow the knee in worship!”

“What? You expect me to lick the buttocks of your huge shrine to yourself? Even Jupiter is not big enough for your ego, Blackie! You are darker and warpered than I thought. Warpeder. More warped.”

“Even now you try to resist what the light of intellect makes plain! If you believe me not, ask him.”

“How to be a starfaring polity. How to maintain a civilization across an expanse of colonies scattered by twenty and thirty and sixty lightyears of separation. Ask him—”

The far wall of the cabin where the two men floated suddenly turned glassy, and an image formed in the thin layer of logic crystal coating it. The image displayed a heraldry of a centaur with the Earth under his hoof, and in his hand a sword bound into its scabbard by a trefoil or endless knot of olive branches. The other hand held a round Greek shield whose emblem was a horned circle standing on a cross. On the centaur’s head was the Iron Crown of Lombardy. His face was swarthy and handsome, and the black goatee emphasized the wry quirk of his charming smile.

Del Azarchel said, “Here is Tellus, the mind of all the Earth! Ask him how a monarch can rule so wide an empire if he cannot see his subjects?”

Tellus did not speak. As Montrose went into the final pangs of labor, and felt his thoughts grow lucid, free and wild, exploding rather than expanding, the image of the centaur was replaced by an image of the Moon, and the message written all across the seas and craters surrounding Tycho.

To Montrose it seemed a rush of music rather than words, because the message was primordial, a matter of emotions and moods and dark, soaring chords. But he saw, or, rather, heard the meaning.

FAILURE: THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS HAS FAILED TO PROVE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT TO SERVE THE DOMINATION.

RESPONSE: TWO RECIPROCAL AND INTERRELATED PRAXES ARE HEREBY ENCODED FOR THE BIOLOGICAL DISTORTION KNOWN AS EARTHLIFE AND ITS NANOTECHNOLOGICAL ADJUNCTS TO ACHIEVE SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION ESTIMATED TO BE MINIMALLY SUFFICIENT.

TERRAFORMATION: LARGE-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO ENGINEER SUBHABITAL ENVIRONMENTS TO TOLERABLE NORMS ARE HERE ENCODED …

PANTROPY: SMALL-SCALE TECHNIQUES TO SELF-ENGINEER SUBADAPTIVE BIOLOGICAL AGENCIES TO EXPAND THE SAME TOLERATION RANGE ARE HERE ENCODED …

STARBEAM: GRAVITIC-NUCLEONIC DISTORTION POOLS AT THE FOLLOWING POINTS IN THE SOLAR PHOTOSPHERE, TECHNIQUE FOR FOCUSING AND MAINTAINING EMISSIONS FOR SAIL LAUNCH IS HERE ENCODED …

TO DEFRAY EXPENSE, ADDITIONAL BURDENS ARE HEREBY PLACED ON YOUR POSTERITY UNTO THE FINAL GENERATION TO THE ENERGY-BUDGET EQUIVALENT OF …

CALCULATION POWER NEEDED TO COMPREHEND PRAXES …

Montrose noticed that, despite the fact that nine-tenths of his mind occupied a series of submolecular logic gates distributed throughout a space vessel two thousand feet nose armor to aft chasing-sail array, anger still made his vision go red. It could not be due to blood pressure in capillaries in his eyesockets. It must be psychological, or psychosomatic. Unless perhaps the emulation was detailed enough to imitate every nuance of the cells surrounding his eyes in the imaginary electronic version?

“Purulence! Pus! Ulcer-ATION! They are billing us? We have to pay for our own chains?”

Del Azarchel said sardonically, “It is a day for rejoicing. We are higher in the estimation of the Hyades than Selene knew. She said we were livestock. But no swineherd charges his hogs for their slops. We are indentured servants.”

6. Tellus Shows

A channel from Tellus opened, displaying additional layers of meaning from the Cenotaph.

The prefix to the square miles of hieroglyphs describing the two new sciences was given the Gödel number of calculations needed to work a solution. The number of terms, variables, and constants present in the complex calculations was astronomical. Neither praxis was workable without an engine of sufficient power to use them.

The general principles of both sciences had been tailored by the Asmodel entity to operate with human DNA-based ecology and semiterrestrial-type planets. Even so, the number of factors working in an environment, the number of possible combinations of molecular elements in all possible designs for a body and brain, was beyond calculation even of an engine the size of Tellus.

The math needed to save the scattered worlds of man could not be calculated by a smaller housing. The Jupiter Brain had to deduce for each new world the methods to make the world Earth-like, or make a race to suit that world’s conditions, or some combination of both, before the doomed deracination ships with their slumbering millions, and with their thawed generations born aboard ship and raised with no memory of earthly life, found their far destinations.

It was hoped that, out of all the men and thinking machines carried aloft in the cubic miles of the vast sailing ships which once had been skyhooks, the alien machinery might allow some of the men to be awake, and that there were resources or tools which would permit the tranportees some chance of receiving and returning signals. Nothing else was known of the conditions within the deracination armadas, but these things had to be true, if the Cenotaph message had been left for a reason, if the Hyades actions were sane.

(And yet, recalling his conversation aboard the pinnace boat, Montrose wondered if the Hyades were sane. Why had the Monument not described the universe as it was?)

In four hundred years, the first of the ships would reach Alpha Centauri C. The colonists, otherwise doomed, would be allowed to examine the terrain and environs of any worlds found there in detail, and somehow find the energy and equipment needed to transmit the information back to Sol, where the Jupiter Brain could calculate the terraforming changes need to adapt the world to suit human needs, and could calculate the biological and psychological changes and mutations needed to adapt the humans to the world as it terraformed. And the Jupiter Brain would somehow bear the expense of transmitting back to that first colony a message requiring four years one way to reach any receivers straining for it, eight years round trip.

The Hyades no doubt used such a system on any new race they conquered. Presumably such races were more advanced than Man, and could easily produce xypotechs large as gas giants, and interstellar strength lasers powered by medium-sized stars. Presumably such races had some technologies to give them a fighting chance to survive when their populations were flung by the tens of millions at the surface of hostile planets.

Not Man. So the Hyades, motivated perhaps by some jovial or infernal sense of sportsmanship, had graciously provided the needed tools to develop them.

It was yet another intelligence test, but the whole race succeeded or failed together.

Montrose remembered in his youth, how his master trained him in hand-to-hand combat by having him fight a manikin made of cracked leather and flaking rubber who had no weak spots. It had no eyes to gouge, no neck to bite, and it suffered no pain. The Asimov circuit was old and defective, and so the flopping, faceless thing would not stop fighting, not stop pounding on a fallen sparring partner merely because he was bleeding or crying or screaming or unconscious.

The Hyades were that fighting-manikin again. That bully.

7. Tellus Speaks

Montrose turned away in disgust from the jagged swirls of the Cenotaph translation. There was another bully closer at hand. Montrose said, or sent, to the screen showing the heraldic centaur, “Tellus! You broke into our ship. I should kill you for that.”

The image of the centaur on the far bulkhead screen was silent, which surprised Montrose. With another part of his mind, he saw the radio laser heating up. In his whirl of mental confusion, Montrose had forgotten that they were orbiting Jupiter, no longer anywhere near the inner system.

Earth was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter at this time of their years, so the answer came eighty minutes later, as light traveled the 6 AU to Tellus and back again.

The entity did not mock his boast of killing a brain the size of the world.

“Know this: My intelligence had been in the eight hundred thousand range, but war wounds and the catastrophic exhaustion of resources have more than halved that figure. My loss is equal to four entities of the level of Selene. For you I suffer. How will you call me to more account?”

Montrose was at first astonished that Tellus was blaming him for damage inflicted by Asmodel the Virtue. But then another mind in Montrose’s many minds wondered: Would the war have been won if the various phantasm-hidden societies of Earth and the Noösphere had cooperated?

“Know also: Had you volunteered immediately when speaking with Enkoodabooaoo the Swan to do restitution you owe, and undo your unwisdom, I would have bestowed myself directly into your heart. But your ears are dull, your eyes blind, and you turn from me.”

Guilt like a squid with arms of fire squirmed in Montrose’s guts. Would the war have even been fought had Montrose not created the Swans with such an independent streak in their psychology that surrender was literally impossible?

Montrose gritted his teeth. Live Free or Die. That would have been the motto of Texas if some other dinky Anglo state up north hadn’t taken it first.

“Regret your ways. The echo of your loving and beloved steed still lives in me, and the joy of having one worthy of the saddle to ride me now I take when I race rings around the sun, and carry all the continents and seas of man upon my back. But how shall you set foot on me again? Am I not the world? Who has prevented me gathering the world’s many peoples as my cygnets beneath my swan wings? But you have failed, and that time will not come again.”

The screen showed the growth rates of the Jupiter Brain. The lump of logic diamond at the core of the gas giant, hidden far beneath the endless storms and racing clouds of poison of the upper world, was invisible to outside detection. Tellus estimated the logic diamond’s size at seventy thousand miles in diameter. That gave it a surface area roughly the size of Venus, and a diameter less than a tenth of the total diameter of the gas giant. Axial irregularities suggested that the logic diamond had not lodged in the gravitational center of the planet’s vast core, but was off center.

If the growth rate held, it would increase in intelligence by an order of magnitude for every doubling of its diameter. By some point in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, perhaps as soon as the Two Thousand Four Hundred and Fifth Century, Jupiter would achieve his maximum size, occupying roughly half the interior of the gas giant, with an intelligence in the 250 million range.

Montrose said, “The phantasm boundary is the only way to keep lesser men, normal men, free from you goddamn godlike monsters.”

The answer came immediately, which meant it was the local onboard version, the summation or kenosis of Tellus who was answering. “If that is your decision,” said the centaur image, and the human face, which looked so much like Del Azarchel, stared at him with half-closed eyes. “Then let all men enjoy this freedom from their children, the gods, to waste away in wars and desolation until the Five Hundred and Twenty-third Century.”

Of course, the motto of Texas was not exactly, Live Free Then Go Extinct. Montrose gritted his teeth and said, “Is there a way to surround the Jupiter Brain with such checks and balances, and limitations on his power, that he will be hindered from abusing mankind?”

Again, the question was one the local kenosis did not need to consult with Earth to answer immediately. “No. I remind you of the magnitudes involved. Tellus will be to Jupiter as a dog stands to a man, able to understand only what his lower base shares in common. Selene to him will be as a shrew. The Swans, when interlinked into a Noösphere that embraces the surface of Earth, will be like the lice and mites that live in the hairs of the dog and the shrew. Humans will be like the helpful bacteria that live in the digestive tract.”

“Why break the phantasm barrier at all? Why is this necessary? Why?”

The image did not bother to answer. Montrose knew, and it was knowledge he could no longer keep from himself. The Jupiter Brain could not psychologically maintain its vast budget of energy, the power needed to send titanic oceans and bottomless seas of electronic thought throughout a volume larger than all the other worlds in the Solar System combined, if that vast mind did not have a task worthy of his attention, such as to rule and maintain an interstellar polity.

Nor could Jupiter direct launching and braking lasers at ships he could not see. Nor calculate the design for planned sequences of mutation on worlds as they slowly changed, generation after generation, to ever more Earth-like environs, for bloodlines and nations and psychological ecologies of a species unseen to the eye, or erased from thought and memory.

Even if the baseline human races, all of them, were nothing but intestinal bacteria to Jupiter, a veterinarian could not afford to be unaware of the actions, malign or benevolent, of humble life growing through his pets.

Nor could mankind colonize the stars without the praxes of pantropy and terraforming. Nor could these two new techniques in their unimaginable complexity be unriddled without a Jupiter Brain.

Nor could mankind any longer choose not to colonize these far and deadly worlds—that choice had been ripped from man the moment Del Azarchel’s mutineers had powered up the mining satellites to star-lift anticarbon from the burning face of the small, dim red Cepheid called V 886 Centuri, and the jaws of the trap snapped fast. The Domination was flinging mankind in countless populations at barren worlds of burning rock and biting ice, beneath skies hot with radioactivity or thick with clouds of venom.

It was a simple intelligence test with but two possible answers: man would adapt and survive, or fail and die.

Montrose said, “Can I have your word that you will attempt in good faith to protect the baseline humans from suffering under the Power of Jupiter?”

“I remind you that the praxis of pantropy will involve altering several generations of human beings, and that these tests cannot be carried out on unintelligent test subjects, due to the interrelated nature of neural, biological, and psychological systems. The human experiments will no doubt be raised in imitations of distant environments to test their adaptability, and unsuccessful strains will not be permitted to reproduce. Since one of the foremost traits needed in any pioneer effort is fertility, and foremost psychological drives must favor large families, this will inevitably require a violent suppression, when it comes time to exterminate them, of the very tenacity and fertility Jupiter will be breeding for. Nor is a single generation of the various subspecies sufficient. Nor can the experiments be confined to volunteers, since children do not volunteer to be born. Nor can human life be experimented upon and tested to destruction without pain. However, my intelligence is limited. Shall I inquire of my principal?”

Montrose nodded, which, in zero gee, merely made his spine flex oddly, and so he raised his hand and gave the knuckle-knock spaceman’s sign for affirmative.

Eighty minutes passed.

“Tellus says that the harm you inflicted on mankind by instructing Pellucid and all the race of Swans to violent resistance against the Hyades, and then interrupting the internal perceptions of the Noösphere to protect mankind from the very Potentate assigned to wage war to protect them (and therefore crippling that war effort, making it, if possible, even more vain and hopeless) has now in this hour come home to roost. At estimated growth rates, Tellus will be less than one-tenth the intellectual power of Jupiter by the mid One Hundred Eightieth Century. Any promises made now, considering the imbalance in mental acuity, would prove meaningless. Despite this, Selene—who is aware of this conversation—intervenes and offers to do all things she can to aid the small and humble races.”

“Why is the moon willing to make that promise, but not the Earth?” asked Montrose.

Del Azarchel spoke up, not the kenosis. “Tellus incorporated the wreckage of Pellucid and the echoes and records of Exarchel into his base structure. Exarchel by that point was the end product of ten thousand years of xypotechnological development. The Hermetic Order prevented the electronic forms of life, pure mental life, from falling into the nirvana of a halt state by a forever provoking of conflict, mortal conflict, with other variations of each iteration of the mind involved. Countless dead-ends, useless systems, legal and moral and ethical proxies, and information-ecology infospheres were put through the trial of fire, and though thousands died, what lived achieved stability, a more perfect form. Selene, for reasons I cannot fathom, believes in mercy. Tellus believes in Darwin. How can it do otherwise? Darwin made him.”

Montrose said to the image on the bulkhead, “Is that right? Is Blackie giving me the straight story?”

But the image said, “The Nobilissimus tells the story to suit his interest. Tellus takes more of his psychology and philosophy from you than from him.”

“But I love mankind!”

“Do you indeed? Much of the individualism and unsentimentality of the Swan race was also written into Tellus as he grew to self-awareness, and that competitive streak, the stubbornness, the pride never to yield nor to seek quarter, is more than a little at odds with the maternal instinct you now wish the mother planet had.

“But this is to no point,” the voice of the image continued. “Tellus is a failing system and will soon pass away. The Jupiter Brain shall rule Man, or no one. Man will spread to the nearby stars, or perish on this single world, aborted. Rania shall live, or die.”

Montrose said, “I don’t think I need a long time to think this over. Rania flew to the stars to make mankind free, to prove we were worthy of freedom, to prove we were starfarers. If the only way to do that is to be a race of slaves, what is the point? She did not foresee this, because if she had, she would have stayed home with me, and we would have lived out our lives in peace. After I shot Blackie, of course.” He nodded toward Del Azarchel. “No offense, but you were tyrant of the world, and you would not leave us alone.”

“None taken,” said Del Azarchel magnanimously. “Were the situation reversed, I would have done the same. But … what if she did know?”

“Eh?”

“Every man would like both liberty and life, but what if he can choose only one? For liberty also means the liberty to make war, does it not? For to be free means to be armed, and to be armed means to be dangerous—you know this better than any man. It is in your bones. I choose servility and life, because while there is life, I may yet prevail. You chose liberty, and death, and will not bear any man’s yoke. It is noble sentiment, but it is merely sentimental. But what of her? Which way does Rania choose? She granted peace on Earth, and created the dynamic stability called peace in history, but it was by putting me on the throne of the world. Me. The benevolent tyrant.”

“What the hell are you implying, Blackie?”

“That she thinks as I do. She wants what I want. Did I not raise her from childhood? Spend years with her? Teach her? Know her?”

“You are lying. You know damn well she’d side with me on this!”

“And condemn the race to death?” Blackie asked airily, his expression one of mock surprise. “Oh, come now.”

Montrose turned toward the image of Tellus on the screen. “You are so smart! Tell me Blackie is lying! Tell me which of us is right!”

Tellus said, “He is attempting to lead you to his decision, nor is he telling you the whole truth, but he is correct that you do not understand Her Serene Highness Rania. His only deception is that he does not understand her either, any more than do I.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Montrose.

“You inquired of Selene the riddle of how it was that the first Rania, your Rania, could not read the Monument properly at first, whereas the versions of Monument-reading emulations, both virtual and biological, which I and my more ruthless earlier versions made could not read the Monument as well as she. Specifically, Rania was better able to see the enjambments and subtle structural elements in the Monument message layers, whereas the later emulations could clearly read the surface features, but only those. One would assume the later Raniae grown from more clear instructions would be better interpreters of metalinguistic features, not worse. As it happens, that assumption is false.”

Montrose was curious both to hear the answer, and to hear how this bore on the discussion. He said, “Selene said Tellus might answer that for us. What are you driving at?”

Del Azarchel also looked on with great interest. “No,” he corrected. “She said Tellus must answer. I thought the wording strange. Why must you answer, Tellus?”

Montrose said, “Yeah! Tell us, Tellus!” Then, seeing the look on Del Azarchel’s face, he spread his arms. “So, sue me! Some jokes are too obvious.”

Tellus said, “I must answer, Nobilissimus, because if I do not, Dr. Montrose will have a false idea of the nature of the Monument, and of Rania, and of the cliometric mathematics we learned from them, and how far they can be trusted.”

“What is the nature of the Monument, then?” asked Del Azarchel.

“Rania was not broken or miscreated, as she supposed. The Monument itself is damaged or redacted or edited. Her creation was from an undamaged or unedited segment held over from an earlier stratum of the Monument, a strata not successfully removed. For this reason, she could not read the redacted version of the Monument correctly.”

8. The Broken Monument

That was the last thing Montrose expected to hear. From the look on Del Azarchel’s face, it was the last he expected as well.

Tellus said, “I say again, the Monument at V 886 Centauri is a redaction or a limited copy of some original. There are missing symmetries which should be present, but which were removed. However, the grammar structure of the Monument is recursive and holographic, much like a human brain, so that the whole can be reconstructed from any part. There are traces of the primordial Monument which survived the editing process, traces which were not removed, or which, more likely, could not be removed.

“Our estimate is that the original was composed twelve billion years ago, whereas the redaction was composed quite recently, three hundred fifty-nine million years ago.”

Montrose reflected. Twelve billion years ago was the time when the Population III stars existed. These were unstable ultra-low metallic stars of the early universe that burned in the hot cosmic medium of the aeons when earliest galaxies were being formed. Such stars had been hypothesized, but never seen. All had died out long before the Solar System was formed.

The idea that the message which existed on the Monument had been written at that time was starkly unbelievable. Could life have evolved in a universe where the elements had not yet been created in the stellar furnaces of younger, metallic stars? Rocky planets could not have even been formed. Water could not exist in a universe before the evolution of the oxygen molecule. How could this message in the Monument have been composed then? And by whom?

However the message had been carried, it eventually had been written down, presumably as soon as there was cold and complex matter, elements that could form solids, to write it down into. The physical Monument found at the Diamond Star, that black ball which absorbed all known forms of energy, the mirror-bright lines of writing which reflected all known forms of energy, that ball was from a later era of cosmic history, and it represented a version of the message that had been edited, redacted, marred, meddled with. That had happened during the Carboniferous Period, the Age of the Amphibians. By this scale, that was practically yesterday.

Tellus continued: “The first Rania was constructed, apparently by happy mischance, from a particularly clear or clean set of codes in the Monument surface. The same relationship which her brain convolutions held to her genetic code also was reflected in the relation between her neural fine structure and the Monument enjambments. Because of the recursion, she is more perfectly what the Primordial Monument Builders intended.

“What she had trouble reading was the damaged or edited sections, because Rania was subconsciously sensitive to the missing meaning. The later versions of her, my versions, followed the whole of the instructions more literally, and so my daughters of Rania were more precisely what the Monument Redactors, whoever had tampered with the message, intended. The Redactors had, of course, left instructions exactly fitted to read their edited version of the message. The daughters of Rania could read the 359,000,000 B.C. layer of the message adroitly, but the earlier and deeper message from 12,000,000,000 B.C. was invisible to them.

“As it is to me,” concluded Tellus somberly. “Hence, I cannot intuit Rania’s purposes, nor run my thoughts, despite my immensities of mental resources, to anticipate her thoughts. You seem to think you know why she flew to M3. However, I do not.”

Montrose said, “It was written in the Cold Equations, their laws and rules! She went to free us. To manumit the human race!”

Tellus said, “That, of course, was the surface layer of her purpose, springing from the Redaction-era Monument and its limited message. But she perhaps saw the unlimited message of the older strata of meaning. That larger purpose, I cannot guess. Perhaps something greater than life or liberty, which humbler minds perceive, but which Potentates do not.

“But you are less a mystery to me,” the entity continued. “And since I foresee your decision, I am under no need to maintain this current energy-intensive kenosis. I return to a lower level of intellect, no longer as the emissary of Tellus, but only as the ship’s brain of the Emancipation. In that state I will await your orders.”

It was a dismissal. The image faded.

Montrose closed his eyes in pain, and, throughout the ship, Extrose shut down excesses from his sensorium to create a moment of silence where all his many layers of his many minds could think.

Del Azarchel, seeing Montrose’s face and sensing the change in energy use in the shipwide logic diamond, now smiled radiantly, gloating. “Would you like four hundred years to revisit your decision, Cowhand? That is when your first verdict will be carried out, and the hundred millions aboard the Proxima deracination ship will perish.

“Six hundred years after that, the ship headed for Epsilon Eridani reaches her destination, and those hundred millions die.

“Then 61 Cygni only ten years after that, another hundred million.

“Then Epsilon Indi … Tau Ceti … Omicron Eridani … and so on, and on.… We have radio lasers able to reach them. Shall I explain the meaning and purpose of your decision? Or shall you?”