Count to a Trillion

16

The Concubine Vector

1. Ceremony

A.D. 2401

Menelaus and Rania were married in June of 2401 in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level and fifteen miles south of the Equator. His Holiness, Pope Innocent XXIV, himself, performed the wedding Mass.

In the silent sky, the blazing star of the secondary drive of the newly re-outfitted Hermetic hung in the blue between the white clouds, above the doves, above the tile-roofed houses, above antique Spanish palaces, above the churches inlaid with Inca gold, and it was a light visible even by day.

The primary drive was a total conversion ion-reaction, and would not be lit while the vehicle was near Earth, for fear that contraterrene carbon particles might escape unconsumed from the magnetic drive core, and if entering the upper atmosphere, would annihilate an equal mass of terrene matter and release gamma radiation and exotic particles. It was not a reasonable fear: normal cosmic ray bombardments were more dangerous, but Rania, as ever, was deferential to the opinion of the common man.

While churchbells pealed, the bride and groom rushed down the carpeted steps into the flower-strewn plaza, half-blinded by thrown cherry blossom petals, she as lightly as a deer, he in his lurching, long-legged lope.

Two lines of dismounted cavalrymen in the magnificent livery of the Swiss Guard (costumes so beautiful legend incorrectly, but understandably, attributed the design to Michelangelo) crossed their pikes, adorned with garlands, high overhead, forming a tunnel of blades down which the couple fled. More Swiss Guard were mounted, their steeds adorned with gold and scarlet, and the line of horses kept the grassy lane before the cathedral clear of people, an avenue of escape. These were harsh-faced, keen-eyed young men, and the last four centuries of organized crime and disorganized brigandage surrounding Rome spread the fame of their hardiness. Pikes of modern materials but ancient design were in hands, and weapons more modern were holstered at hip: batons able to administer lethal shocks, or aiming lasers to call down fire from lightweight sniper platforms on rooftops or hanging invisibly in heaven on wings of gauzy blue.

The bridal veil was yards upon yards of white satin, trimmed with diamond studs and sparkling sapphires, held by a score of young queens who, in this age of the world, were as slim and lovely as the craft of genetic engineering could make them.

Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the Hermetic second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.

Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.

As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew, high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.

Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.

The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.

“You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.

Menelaus had solved Rania’s neural divarication problem, and she had not been willing to wait, either to put off the wedding for the medical process, or to put off the medical process for the wedding. Since her preset RNA-spoofing black cells in her bloodstream were already programmed to make a universal and rapid change, it was nothing to tweak totipotent cells into her leg bones and muscles. She spent the night before the wedding in a biosuspension coffin, with seven quarts of nanomachinery moving through her body, while Menelaus struggled with the fear that she would wake up as someone different.

So far, she seemed to be normal.

“We discussed this,” she said, eyes elfin, mouth impish, “during our spat. Our first lovers’ quarrel! You lost.”

He hated the fact that the top of her head no longer fit nicely under his chin when they hugged. Now the crown of her head was at the level of his lower lip, and it bothered him more than it should have: it reminded him of the time he found out when he was four years old that pi could not be resolved to any rational number. It seemed obscurely unnatural, as if someone had made a mistake when putting the universe together.

“I’ll be made of sterner stuff when we reach the bridal bower, my fair rebel. Bad enough womenfolk can’t decide what to wear; what damn fool gave them the science to fashion up their flesh and bone, tissue and face?”

“Why! The recent breakthroughs in biotechnology are due, my beloved, to someone’s policy of total honesty to the public. We cannot blame the Hermeticists—they did not invent the system. Someone else performed a mathematical analysis of combination-solutions in genes, a notation system he read off the Monument back when he was insane. Who is to blame, then?”

“What? Next you’ll say the apeman who invented fire is to stand trial for every act of arson since the Stone Age.”

“Hush, for there are sure to be press and spy-bees near the bridal car.”

When they came to the end of the carpet, the flower-festooned electric car was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was Yorvel, looking plump and ridiculous in the gold-purple-scarlet livery of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, pole-arm held gingerly in one hand, bridle held firmly in the other. He was trying to restrain a nervous, stamping steed, a red horse the hue of blood.

Rania said in a voice of limpid surprise, “But where is our car?”

Menelaus petted the nose of the huge horse, who gently nuzzled him, sniffing with large, delicate nostrils the gold and ebony costume, the wide lace collar, wherein bridegrooms of this era and rank were clad. “What? The Pope arrives with forty-nine white horses and one red charger that I’ve owned for a year now, and you don’t recognize him?” He petted the long nose carefully. “There, my hayburning poop-factory. What does she know? She didn’t mean it. Born in a tin can in space, she was. No, no, don’t be wroth. Now, upsy daisy.”

“What? Husband mine, your delirium is to have me, in all my fine and delicate satin, balance atop the spine of this outsized uncouth mammal? Am I an acrobat? Am I a cavegirl, to be juggled and bounced atop a zoo creature? Where are the brakes? Where is the safety setting? The whole system of muscles and veins—I speak now as a lady who has more than dabbled in engineering—seems to be directly controlled by the organic brain of a horse, with no manual override or direct interface. As a motile arrangement, ungainly, and less responsive than having the caterers carry me in a punchbowl.”

“My strong right arm is your safety, my horsemanship your control.”

“I shall look ridiculous.”

“History books’ll clean it up, Rainy. ’Sides, if you look good to me, hang the world.”

“I say I will not have it.”

“And I say you will. Who is to be the man in my house, eh?” And with no further ado, he took her in one arm and swung her into the saddle, where Res Ipsa Nova, sensing her nervousness, danced and trembled. She emitted one short yelp of surprise, and clung to the mane; and the delighted crowd roared.

Yorvel meshed his fingers and bent, as if to allow Menelaus a leg up. Menelaus ignored both Yorvel and the stirrup, but merely put his hands on the horse’s flanks and vaulted himself into the saddle, half-colliding with his mussed bride. Her coronet was askew, and the trailing lace in her hair was tangled, but Rania sat with straight posture, and favored the crowd with a wave of her gloved hand.

“My master is a madman, and is too mad to know he is mad,” murmured Yorvel from about the level of Menelaus’s knee. “Do you know what I had to do to spread your bribes? The Schweizergarde were snickering in their mustachios. They never would have agreed to smuggle in your horse, except they are die-hard romantics. And you don’t treat your beast right: leaving him here in this heat with this caparison! And now you are going to double his load? He will buck you off, and you will fall on your royal buttocks, Master! The picture bugs will photograph it, and all the newsfeeds will show it, and add comic music as a soundtrack to the sidebar.”

“Everyone needs a good laugh,” grunted Menelaus, tearing the loose, huge collar from his neck and flinging it into the air. “Now we’re fixing to take our French leave of this crowd, and shin out. Nova! Gid-YAWP!”

And in a moment the steed, as the wind, flew past the pillar supporting a statue of Winged Independence, and his hoofbeats were the thunder. The bridal veils and white laces flowed behind, snapping bravely, shedding roses, and the bride clung tightly to her dark-faced, glittering-eyed groom. Perhaps she smiled, but her face was pressed to his chest. The crowd roared and parted, a frightened Red Sea.

The beast was as magnificent a steed as modern genetic meddling could make him: so it was astonishing, but not impossible, when he cleared the heads of the onlookers at the end of the lane, made it over the pilings into a rich man’s garden, danced in a cloud of dust first down the steep slope of the mountainous terrain, and then galloped madly up the further slope, leaping from rock to sliding rock as nimbly as a goat, mane and tail like flame.

All the photographers, both professional and merely curious, sent their bees flying after, but Quito was a city known for privacy, because the mountain winds often blew the tiny instruments astray. One or two bolder fellows, or more curious, followed on foot the trail of dust a few score yards down the slope, but gave up the chase as the sorrel’s long legs opened the distance on the uphill run, and the bride and groom were carried in a leap over the crest and out of sight. One man tried to follow on an antique petrol-powered motorcycle no doubt lent to him from a collector, but he had not practiced the old skills, and he left his machine in a heap when it struck a rock; hoots and whistles greeted him as he climbed painfully back up slope.

The remaining members of the photography cadre, sitting atop their electric carriages with cameras and lens-tubes enough to equip a small astronomical observatory, exchanged lost shrugs and bewildered smiles. Meanwhile the mounted Swiss, the only men there truly able to see the horsemanship, good and bad, that Menelaus displayed, raised their swords and lances and shouted, “Acriter et Fideliter!”

Yorvel laughed until he lost his breath, and sat on the ground, pulling a hip-flask of whiskey from underneath his borrowed uniform. “No woman is truly a bride until she is stolen away on horseback! That is what horses are for! Like in all the old tales! A magnificent gesture! Madness, like all magnificent gestures, of course. But a good madness, most needful and proper to the mental health: like the shock of a stiff drink, just the thing to put a man in his right spirits. It would be madness to be sane and sober on a day like this.” And he mopped his brow with his handkerchief, laughing and drinking and roaring with merriment until he wept.

2. The Celestial Tower

Above the city loomed the Celestial Tower; titanic, cyclopean, rising straight from the crown of a mountain and upward as far as the eye could see. It dwindled with perspective to a point, like a highway seen in the desert.

Except that this, Menelaus thought, was surely a highway to the sky.

Menelaus had been following the old railroad tracks for some time as the sun settled in a welter of red into the sea. Rania rode with her body leaning against his chest and, despite that the ride must have been uncomfortable, did not complain.

It was dark now, and insects were singing. The scent of forest below the mountain slopes hung in the night air, and the distant chattering of animals could be heard. The city was still around them, but modern Patagonian cities were miraculously quiet: Menelaus noticed again the lack of the machine noise. It was also a splendor of lights, like constellations, down the slopes and underfoot. Here were Colonial-era buildings, held in spotlights for the tourist trade: the Plaza de la Independencia, there were the many churches, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the old Archbishop’s Palace. In a world where a tourist could arrive from any continent in a matter of minutes, the beautiful places of the Earth were kept spotless. The light shone, and Menelaus felt as if he were treading the galaxy underfoot, or a carpet of diamond dust.

The suburbs were like islands in the sky, with bridges linking the paved areas. But half a mile from any building in any direction might be found a sudden slope, rock and flints, not good for foundations. A high civilization merely a stone’s throw from empty wasteland.

They were high. From here the volcanoes that punctured the mountains to each side of the city could not be seen, but Menelaus knew where they were. He could have found them in his sleep.

Guagua Pichincha was westward, toward the sea; Cayambe Reventator was to the east; Chacana, Antisana, and Sumaco trailed away to the southeast; Cotopaxi was due south. In the distance, more than eighty miles away south, Tungurahua and Sangay. Far to the north, the peak of Galeras. All were active to some degree, with artificial vents opened to relieve pressure in a controlled fashion. Galeras was more active than the others, suffering a major burn that had been postponed for the wedding: now a plume of smoke like a second tower reached toward the stars, bending in the wind only a bit. Its upper reaches were torn and dissipated into grayish clouds. The lower parts looked so dark and sturdy, nearly the same color as the Celestial Tower, but as if built of smoke.

The volcanoes unnerved him. Controlled? He hoped so, even though the old and worn systems of volcano-preemption were from the previous rulers of this place, older even that the Coptic Order, the Late Hispanosphere. It was the years Menelaus slept through, but still ancient history.

Around him was a land of fire, cities perched on peaks moated by cliffs over empty air. The massive geothermal energy of the place was what allowed the Celestial Tower to be here.

He reined his sorrel and looked up.

The middle reaches of the tower, far above, were still blushed rose with the light of a distant sunset. This alpine glow made the tower seem to float, weightless in the twilit heavens, a supernatural apparition.

Farther above, the towerlight was a vertical streak of yellow gold, where the upper regions were still in direct sunlight. And yet again above that, craning back his head and squinting, Menelaus could barely make out a harsher gleam, a glint, where the sun’s radiation, undiluted by any atmosphere, splashed onto the tower side in naked vacuum.

The tower-top itself, the spaceport called Quito Alto, shined faint and distant at the very vanishing point of the perspective. Normally, it was not so bright as to be seen by the naked eye. Now, however, it outshined the evening star. It was a star that neither rose nor set.

“Our honeymoon suite,” he said.

She said, “I thought you would like to be near the canopy of space, my old home.”

“When did they erect this?”

“Never.”

“What?”

She giggled, a sound like silver chimes. “They lowered it. None of the weight sits on the ground. Seventy years ago, during the high point of Hispanosphere ascendancy. The King of Spain wanted an enduring monument to his tyranny, and he thought there would be traffic from a moonbase, asteroid mining, expeditions, and, yes, a colony on Ganymede or Titan.”

“What happened?”

“War interrupted.”

“Which one?”

Rania just shrugged. “The Yellow War.”

“Which one was that? What was it about?”

Rania spoke in a soft, haunted voice. “You may ask the survivors for details. Inspect your coffins dated between 2333–2338. Both sides experimented on captured civilian populations with RNA-spoofing. The bloated monstrosities and boneless knots of flesh were biosuspended, because there was no way to keep them alive. They are now your wards.” She looked up.

Menelaus wore a puzzled frown, as if he had not realized that the fate of those slumbering souls was now his responsibility.

She said, “Work on the tower slowed. It was maintained by private subscriptions for a while.”

Menelaus gazed at the Celestial Tower. “And then?”

“And then what? There is no ‘and then.’”

“The tower is still there.”

“Worthless to Earth,” she said, sadly.

“The road to the stars!”

“The road to nowhere. The moonbase was abandoned due to bone-sickness. No colony on Ganymede was ever founded. It would have cost less, and been a friendlier environment, to build a greenhouse at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, and farm that. But since the Patagonian, African, and Gobi wastelands were blooming for the first time since the Triassic … so who would bother? After the war, first one institution then another maintained it, despite the volcano danger here. The Third Era of Space could begin at any moment, since launch costs are, even now, as long as that tower stands, merely the cost of a spider car, one going up, one coming down. Oh, look!”

He saw, high above, what seemed to be a meteor shower. For a moment or so, silver streaks of fire were falling to either side of the twilit, red-gold tower.

“What is it?”

“Decay. Fragments of ablative ceramic, from the upper structure, microscopic nano-tube fragments that have lost their Van der Waals adhesion. The tower is old, old, and its joints are stiff; its skin is peeling; upper sections suffer from sunburn and accumulated metal fatigue. It is a pendulum, you see, but the balancing governors are no longer in synch. I had been hoping your Pellucid would help us solve some of the calculation errors.”

Pellucid was the name for his Van Neumann diamond project. He had finally decided on an environment where the machines could be released with minimal danger to the human race. The depthtrain system had given him the idea.

Pellucid would be sent to govern a system for sensing and distributing pressures across the tectonics of Quito’s volcanic region. If it worked, Pellucid would be able to grow down the sides of old volcano vents, and spread as far and wide along the inner mantle of the Earth as need be, to gather valuable information about magma pressure systems as they formed. The more miles the diamond colony covered, the more calculating power it would have. Any single diamond, or any set of them, could be turned to any number of specialized functions as need dictated. The trick was to make them die on exposure to surface conditions.

Rania was speaking softly. “The tower is a living thing. It breathes, pumping air up to the station; its heart pumps hydraulics and coolants; it sweats, after a fashion, to distribute heat across its skin; it has nerves to carry energy and sensations of stress and wind-shear from one part of its structure to another; and it moves, shifting weight, flexing, maintaining balance. I have always felt its sorrow, rooted to this spot of rock, its upper head in space.”

“It is just standing there?”

“Standing, no. It sways like a dancer: these inhabited sections at the bottom, the malls and parking warehouses are an anchor point.”

“You know what I mean. It ain’t being used.”

“But it is. The Torre Real was recently bought by my people, and renamed the Celestial Tower. I wanted to call it the Golf Tee, because of its shape, but my publicity consultants insisted on a more dignified name: I should have followed my instinct and saved myself their fees, because these days everyone calls it the Folly Tower.”

Menelaus frowned when he heard that. “One of most ace-high bits of engineering this poxy race of man ever built, and they call it foolwork? Someone should make ’em regret that name. What if we set it to rights, put it back in business? We got the money.”

“A noble dream,” she said, almost dismissively, but smiling. “Del Azarchel would have allowed it, had I married him, because then any increase in my power and authority would have increased his also. But now?”

Montrose looked up. “I saw a flare.”

“It is a correction burn. There is a tourist hotel at the spot twelve miles up, clinging to the carbon nanotube tether proper. The cable swells from a one-centimeter diameter at the top of the anchor atop the base superscraper, to almost a hundred meters wide at the geostationary point. The tourist hotel is much lower than that, still inside the stratosphere. It was ordered closed many years ago.”

He opened his mouth to ask why, and snapped it shut again. He knew why. Del Azarchel did not want people being too curious about outer space.

He pointed at a cluster of lights, bright as a small city seen from orbit.

He said, “Is that it?”

“No, that is the spaceport itself, which is above the atmosphere. You cannot see from this angle, but the cable is bent to the west whenever a payload rides up, due to the differences in angular momentum of the spider car versus the various sections of cable—the horizontal increment of speed increases with altitude. The Hotel of Sorrow is not overhead, but hangs above the Pacific Ocean.”

“If I had had a tower like this, hanging up, all shining over my head, I would not have waited for Del Azarchel and his bully boys to give me permission to mount up and go into space. I would have stormed the damn place, and forced my way aboard any vessels the spaceport could support! What happened to these people these days? Spineless as squids, I call ’em.”

“Some cherish the long peace. Some fear a return of fire from heaven.”

“Man shouldn’t be afraid. Men were bolder, life was better, in my time.”

“Oho? Was it? So says a man who shot lawyers for a living, back in the good old days.” Her eyes twinkled with mirth.

“There are some that envy me that job. I’ve heard it called a public service, shooting lawyers.” He had to smile.

She did not let her smile show, but there was a lilt in her voice. “Let us excuse it on those grounds, then, and call it the practice of a more excitable era. But perhaps you will tell me more about why your people hanged Mormons?”

“When they stole our women. But who cares who shot first? War changes people, and biowar makes ’em crazy. I weren’t around when the rumors flew that the Mormons were tainted, infected with Spore, and wouldn’t take blood transfusions needed to clean them. I heard stories from my aunt what those rumors did. The Burnings. It must never happen again.”

She said, “To eliminate all diseases was the dream of the Pure Order. They were well on their way to making the race too hygienic to resist the next disease: and there was a next one, and many next ones. No pathogens of this century are entirely natural. Those not caused nor encouraged by bad medical practice of the last generation, are descended from non-self-eliminating biotic weapons from the generation before.”

Menelaus just grunted. “Darwin’s curse.”

“Curse? If so, we must take care with our own curses. The secret of second youth we released to the public I fear will also result in the same dieback cycle, as pathogens robust enough to survive the molecular-level scrubbing the second youth process involves will find themselves alone in a rich and newly-virginal environment, without competition, and without natural defenses against them.”

“Agh! That’s pessimistic talk. You got to have faith that our children will be able to invent the means to fight whatever comes up. We could not just sit on the secret of youth and let everyone’s grammy up and die.”

Rania smiled, as she always did when the talk turned to children.

Menelaus said, “Hellfire, and I ain’t just talking about disease: disease did not cause the Human Torch parades in Utah. One day science will fix things, so this part of us, this vicious part, will be caged up. The Beast. Maybe we can make a child without the gene for sorrow and rage, maybe we can make a thinking machine without the subroutine for hate. Maybe.”

“We have the genes and routines now,” she said. “The cure for hate is forgiveness. The cure for outrage is humility. The cure for sorrow is thankfulness. Even a child can learn these three: no grand scheme of human eugenics to produce the transhuman is needed.”

He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”

“Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”

She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.

When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”

3. Limits

Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a resentment, a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.

Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.

During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.

The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.

He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?

“And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”

She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”

“He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the Hermetic is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said the Hylics but he caught himself.)

“He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it Exarchel.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”

“And the rest of Mankind?”

“The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”

“Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”

She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”

“Har! Or is it just that you helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”

She said, “The world we found when the Hermetic descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”

“You’re on a first-name basis with him?”

“What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”

“So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”

“I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the how and the when and the why to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”

“The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Democracy on a worldwide scale? The Chinese outnumber the Australians, and would have voted to abolish international corporate structures. The Azanians would have merely bribed Africa to vote their way on matters of public import. The Copts would have voted the Jews out of Babylon.”

“I mean a limited Democracy.”

“Oh, but I did limit it! The aristocratic class forms a bulwark against overreaching by the commoners. I encouraged an irenic but established sacerdotal order to create legal sanctuary against overreaching aristocrats. I encouraged a formal system of intelligence-augmented bureaucrats to check the fervor of religious zeal, and also to give a harmless outlet to the morbid impulses of academics. I encouraged the arrogance of the plutocracy to check the warlike desperation of the common man, who otherwise would elevate a despot to check the aristocrats: the plutocrats can only maintain their precarious positions by serving rather than commanding their customers. And so on. The parts are all balanced against each other.”

“What went wrong?”

“Intelligent I may be, but not experienced. Book learning is not the same. I am younger than you are, biologically. I am just a girl.”

“That don’t sound like a mistake to me. You being a girl and all.”

“Yet I underestimated the bull-headed blindness of the male of the species. I put too much faith in incentives, and too little faith in the original sin. You see? The Hermeticists are as a ship in a storm, and I have left them only one safe landing zone: namely, they must organize an expedition to the Diamond Star to replenish the energy of civilization, or else the whole structure will collapse. This means they must abdicate power, and decentralize their Conclave to another structure I have prepared to receive it, the Special Advocate Executive of the Concordat. There are several legal mechanisms in place to do this, including an appointment by agency, or invoking a general convention of the Parliament. The Advocacy includes agents of mine, men I have intermittently trained and cultivated over decades. They have so often acted for the Conclave that the Commons would accept them as legitimate. But…”

Her voice trailed off.

“… But the Hermeticists are too stupid.” He finished the sentence for her.

She nodded sadly. “You speak ill of the men who raised me. They are my fathers.”

“I speak ill, but I speak the damn truth, don’t I? They’d rather hang on to power and ride the wild tiger with its tail afire, risking war and world destruction, rather than go home and live on the farm like Washington did.”

“It’s a male trait, this lust for potency, I think,” she said.

“Weren’t Washington a male? Anyhow, Princess, I ain’t convinced you have the best set-up here, and I ain’t convinced seeing it shatter is so much more to cry over than seeing it kept.”

She shrugged her soft shoulders, ghostly in the light from the city underfoot, and the stars above. “This is not a gunpowder age. What if the world shatters also? You have not studied the problem, so how could you be convinced?”

“It’s still a damnified tyranny, and free men shouldn’t stand it.”

“Places on the globe where that is so, such places enjoy a greater liberty under our Concordat. Your North America is controlled only by alliances, media monopolies, and power stations. They still meet in their town meetings and have votes: but they cannot vote for war. Nor for anything that leads to war. Do you understand the limits of liberty? There are antimatter weapons in the hands of men like Del Azarchel and Narcís D’Aragó, men who like to see skyscrapers and farmlands on fire. The more power is in human hands to destroy human life, the more carefully limits must be placed on that liberty—why do you look askance! What I say is as much common sense as drawing in shrouds during a storm of sunspots, or walking more slowly when near a brink! If you would have me restore your precious liberties to the common men, I will have to take the antimatter away, and leave them in the dark.…”

At that moment the car wobbled in the high-altitude wind, and the couple found themselves in each other’s arms, looking into each other’s eyes, and talk of these disagreeable matters was interrupted, not without laughter, by divertissement more fascinating to them.

4. Reception

There was a reception awaiting them at twenty-five thousand feet. Even this was below the level of the Honeymoon Suite of the long-closed hotel. The staff were not concierges and maids, but instead were astronauts and engineers, Rania’s picked men, who had recently reopened the facilities, with much fanfare, and many announcements that another Space Age was soon to begin. Many of these men were Psychoi, the intelligence-augmented Mandarin class—but here in the tower they doffed their silver wigs and proudly displayed their spacer’s crewcuts, or wore the tight, uncomfortable bonnets meant to serve as padding for space helmets. Montrose spoke only to one or two, and he was not sure he trusted them, but they did seem to share his enthusiasm for a new space program, and there was champagne, and colored lights floating in the upper atmosphere beyond the pressurized windows, and many a toast and a cheer to the happy couple, and so Montrose decided to smother his suspicions. Perhaps he was finally home at last, in the future he had always dreamed. The bubbles in his glass twinkled like stars as he raised it to his bride, who blushed and smiled just like any girl, princess or not.

But Menelaus was impatient, full of laughter and lust, and would not stay for more. He seized upon his young bride, all wrapped in white satin and white silk, and hoisted her in his arms, amid calls and shouts and sprays of wine. Up they went again in the spider car, this one tied with ribbons and scrawled with well wishes. All fell silent as the atmosphere thinned outside.

There was no one else in the structure, which was not yet ready for civilian traffic: Rania and Menelaus went here partly for privacy, partly for publicity.

At last they were alone.

5. Honeymoon Suite

At midnight, she woke him, but when he turned on the sleeping mat to take her in his arms, she seemed oddly stiff and distracted. He felt something cold and rectangular, the size of a small book, in her hands. It felt slightly warm, as if circuits were active.

The deck of the suite was pressurized nano-diamond, transparent and practically invisible; the lights of the city beneath the clouds below could be glimpsed. It looked to Menelaus like a galaxy underfoot. Here and there were dim reddish glows from the teeth of active volcanoes, looking like nebulae where stars were born. To one side, the full moon hung above her twin sister gleaming in the sea. He looked for but did not see a line of golden glitter dancing like a restless road across the waters; this was the light reflected from the tower, and it had been visible when he went to sleep. At this hour the whole length of the tower was in night, and even Quito Alto high above them was occluded by Earth’s shadow.

It was the stars that were so bright, so beautiful. They seemed almost within reach.

The moonlight illumed the suite, picking out the white walls, the bird-painted paper screens, the lightweight fixtures of clear ceramic or diamond crystal. The tatami mats on the transparent floor were spread wide, so that little fulvous squares seemed to hang against the abyss of night air.

No fancy gold or marble here. It turns out that Rania, when alone, preferred something along the lines of the spartan space-habitat furnishings she’d been raised with.

Except the shower, of course. No spacer had a shower like this: it occupied most of the suite. The crystal walls were only slightly dimmed—what need had young honeymooners for privacy?—by showerheads, soap servers, and massage fingers, as well as waterproof speakers for bathing-music coordinated to the water play. One could swim in the glass basin with the Earth floating beneath. The moonlight from the sea below shined through the pond that Rania had left in the basin of her shower, and so a web of silver light, crisscrossed by ripples, breathed and fluttered on a chamber ceiling.

An imaginary picture of her stark naked and reading a book (not to mention the non-imaginary real girl, warm and girl-scented, supple limbs and clinging hairs of gold and all) for some reason was arousing to him. The girls back in his hometown, even ones he had been sweet on and too shy to court, had not had much use for book learning.

He rubbed his eyes and slapped himself in the cheek to wake himself up. Sternly, he told himself to pay attention to what was going on.

“I’ve read the Monument, up to the Xi Segment.” Her voice was haunted, strange.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” he said.

“What need have I for sleep? There are sections of my brain of which I was hitherto unaware.”

A sensation of terror overcome Menelaus. The changes he had introduced to her nervous system, his attempt to correct the errors in her base gene pattern, perhaps they had waited until she entered REM sleep to reorganize her consciousness.

“Are you still the same person?” he asked.

“More than I was,” she laughed, “but I have lost nothing.”

“What is it? Why are you awake?”

“You were snoring, you rude swine, falling asleep like that! And I could not sleep—I wondered at the joy and pain—”

“Jesus Christ! I didn’t hurt you!”

She giggled. “You are blushing!” Now she seemed normal again.

“Am not! And you shouldn’t talk of such things!”

“I am your wife. If you cannot discuss the mechanics of rutting with me, then with whom?”

“Gah! My mother would box my ears.”

“She is absent. I am the woman of your life hereafter.”

“That suits me.”

There was an intermission of kissing, and so forth. When she put her arms around him, he could feel the cold corner of the square in her hand, digging into his back.

They parted for air. He said, “How could you tell I was blushing? You can’t see me in this gloom.”

From the way her hair moved in the dark, he could sense the triumphant cock of her head. “I don’t need to see. I am your wife. I am yours. Yours. Nothing else you think you own, no wealth, no steed, no knowledge, no accomplishment will ever truly be yours as I am yours, your very own, for only I give myself wholly and fully, with all free will.”

“Now you’re blushing.”

“I don’t blush. I glow. And you cannot see me.”

“Pox. I don’t need to see. I’m your man.”

“Not just my man, my crewman.”

“Pox on that! I wear the pants in this family.”

“You are not wearing pants now.”

“I am still chief. You squaw. Got it?”

“Yes, milord, my husband, and my master. What are your orders?”

“I order you to tell me what you want me to do. It ain’t like I ain’t wrapped around that wee little finger of yours.”

“For my part, I swore to love, honor, and obey. I will honor you now. You alone can I trust with what I discovered.” And she pressed the square into his hands.

It was an antique desk pad, scarred and battered with use, and covered with cheery little pictures of flowers and butterfly-winged fairies. There was also in brass an emblem of a youth with winged sandals and winged cap, snake-twined rod in hand, one toe on a globe, one hand on a star: the symbol of the Joint Hispanosphere-Indosphere Hermetic Expedition.

She tapped the surface of the pad. A crowned and twinkling fairy-sorceress appeared in the glass, displayed a list of menu choices, one of which was Stinky Baby’s Monument Translation.

Montrose realized that this was her personal bookpad, the one she had aboard the ship as a little girl. “Who is Stinky Baby?”

“You.”

“What!”

“My name for you back on my ship. You were the only man I had ever seen who was not gray and wrinkled, and you slept in your coffin for months and years, and that fit the definition I read in the dictionary for a baby. Besides, you wore a diaper, because you did not know how to use a toilet bag. How was I to know what you were?”

“Stinky?”

“The diaper had to be reused.”

She touched the pad again. The bookpad screen had a fairy figure dancing across the surface, waving a wand dripping sparks, and in her wake an image formed of the labyrinth of alien mathematical codes from the Iota and Lambda segments. Lambda was a reprise of the political economic calculus of the Iota Segment, but drawn out in more detail. In floating windows in the margins were translations into the simplified Monument Notation, and then into the Human-Monument Pidgin.

She said, “The Monument Builders have a mathematical expression in the Iota Segment to define the degree of mutuality extended to each measured rank of lesser beings. We are a form of life which might prove useful to their purposes, in a marginal way, even as dogs do tasks for shepherds.”

“Wolves, you mean. We’ll fight and die first.”

“While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution.”

“You got a better one?”

“Yes, for now is the hour of my awakening. I am here to do what I was meant to do. You, my husband, have made me whole.”

She was speaking in a calm, almost eerie voice, but then suddenly her voice broke into sobs and she was in his arms, weeping, rubbing her tears against his chest.

“Hey! What’s—what’s wrong? Supermen don’t cry!” He held her one-handed, the bookpad in the other. The light from the pad screen fell across her buttocks and legs.

“Tears of joy, of joy unknown to lesser men, they do,” she said, sniffing and hiccupping as she laughed. “I know who I am! At long last!”

“Uh. Okay. Hit me. Who are you?”

“The redeemer. I will vindicate the human race.”

“Uh. Okay. What the hell does that mean?”

Rania wiped her nose on her elbow and spoke to the pad. “Twinklewink! Bring up file code last.” The floating fairy on the screen overlaid the Monument lines with a second and third layer of hieroglyphs.

To him she said, “You have read as far as the Iota and Kappa segments, which gives their equations of political calculus. What you call the Cold Equations.”

He nodded. “Basically, the stars are so far apart it ain’t worth no one’s time and effort to cross the abyss, unless they have a planet to conquer and loot on the other side.”

“That applies only when the power imbalance is vertical. In general game theory, a situation of mutual benefit and expected mutual benefit is best. Both parties in the transaction must remain players in the game long enough for a move and a response to be completed. There is a natural marriage of interests between any two intelligent species—if their intelligence is roughly the same, their resources, their ability to benefit each other.”

She talked to the pad. The little fairy cursor brought up more screens.

More Monument hieroglyphs appeared on the screen, in a column with the pidgin translation. It was farther than Montrose had ever read; farther than (as best he knew) Del Azarchel had ever read.

Rania said, “Here is a vector sum in the time-relation I call the Concubine Vector. It is when the natural marriage of interests is between unequal partners. The Concubine Vector defines how much abuse and exploitation the inferior partner can be expected to suffer. The mathematics are quite elegant, even if the idea is horrid. One can define precisely, for example, how much shoplifting a shop can tolerate before losing either profit or customers, or how much criminal activity a town should stand before they create a police force, and how much police corruption to endure before creating checks on police power. And so on.”

“So what does the Concubine Vector say?”

“It does not say that the human race will be slaves forever to the machines of Hyades.”

“Good!”

“Only for many tens of millennia.”

“No good.”

“It is, strictly speaking, indentured servitude, not slavery outright, since the laws defined by the Cold Equations require they manumit the race as soon as we have paid back value equal to what it took to conquer us, plus a reasonable profit, of course.”

“Bugger them. They got no right to conquer us and make us pay for it. That’s just stupid. And why are they doing this? And why are they bragging about it? Why post their plans up on this Monument for all and sundry to see?”

“Because the Cold Equations require mutual communication for the natural marriage of interests to work, even within this ‘Concubine Vector’ of unilateral exploitation. The math itself shows things go more badly for both conqueror and conquered if both sides do not know exactly the rules and limits of the other.”

“Okay. So why were you crying with joy?”

“Because I can redeem us. Pay the price they ask. Isn’t it clear?”

“As mud at midnight, it is.”

She tapped two of the little lines of alien math, so that the image rotated, and slid over to another side of the Monument segment, and overlapped a different group of Celtic knots. The negative spaces formed glyphs in the same Monument notation.

“I am called away: and you, if you will come.”

“God himself could not stop me. Away to where?”

“Can’t you read it?” She seemed surprised.

“Not at a glance, when I’m sleep-fogged. What’s it say?”

“It defines our destination.”

In his imagination, he turned the Monument hieroglyphs into an emulation code that he ran in the back of his mind and formatted the results as a visual image: the mighty spiral of the galaxy, arms of billions of stars reaching through clouds and streamers of nebulae, through flocks of frozen planets, rivers of interstellar asteroids, and belts of dark matter, million-year-old storms of energy, gravity stress-points, and all the other minutia the Monument Builders tracked.

Overlaid was a spiderweb of lines representing divarication and information cascade functions, representing political lines of control.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

“I see something interesting. The Hyades Domination is just a collaboration of slave races themselves. They are janissaries; fighting slaves. They belong to a higher power.”

6. Star Map

The Hyades Cluster, at 151 lightyears away, was not the top of the system of lines representing the hierarchy. Functions connected it to the Praesepe Cluster in Cancer, some 550 lightyears away.

Praesepe was shown as the ascendant power in control of the local area of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. The Monument described traffic and control leading not just from Praesepe to the civilization in the Hyades Cluster, but also controls leading to Xi Persei in the California Nebula (1500 lightyears from Sol), the Pleiades (440 lightyears), M34 in Perseus (1400 lightyears), and the Orion Nebula (1600 lightyears) centered at the Trapezium Cluster. The notation showed this last location was the center of engineering activity, where the native civilization was making new stars. Praesepe also ruled the civilizations centered in the Coma Berenices Star Cluster, centered on the A-type binary 12 Comae Berenices: According to the Monument, one star of the pair had been artificially agitated to extreme stellar output.

Six interstellar polities of unimaginable immensity were under the control of whatever ruled the Praesepe Cluster. No human empire, until the rise of the Hermeticists, had learned how to control even so small a dustspeck as that third of the Earth which happened to be dry land, much less conquering and occupying other worlds, gas giants, stars, interstellar clouds of dust. These far-reaching supercivilizations seemed concentrated only in immense clusters of matter-energy, such as star-clusters where the stars were thick, nebula where new stars were being formed.

And yet there was something above and beyond even the Praesepe civilization and its half-dozen servitor civilizations: orbital elements described traffic between this and M3 in Canes Venatici, a globular cluster outside the rim of the galaxy, some 33,900 lightyears distant.

“How do you translate these three glyphs?”

“I think they are proper names, or, rather titles. The first one you translated—back when you were Baby Stinky—as referring to a superior power confronting an inferior, and you called it ‘Hegemony.’ Note the best translation, because it is not merely political superiority, but intellectual, a matter of further time-binding. I called it ‘Domination.’ The notation measuring information volume and matter-energy consumption says that they are so far above us that they can have only a master–servant relationship. A man who owns many flocks to a shepherd-boy.

“The next stands in like ratio with the first: a transcendent authority. I called it ‘Dominion.’ They are as far above us as a shepherd above a sheepdog, a creature that can serve its purposes in a limited way, and can have a reciprocal master–pet relationship, but not a contract. The Dominion is seated at the Praesepe Cluster, relatively near to us.

“But look. Even they are beholden to a power beyond. Whatever holds authority at M3, in Canes Venatici, is represented by the symbol reflected on itself twice, representing two orders of magnitude: it indicates the extension of influence in every direction. An absolute power, a form of being that never ceases to replicate and expand itself. An absolute Authority. It stands to us as a man stands to the benevolent or malevolent microbes or protozoa living in his sheepdog’s stomach, something of interest to the shepherd only insofar as it might prove useful or harmful.”

7. The Absolute Authority

“So we have to go to the bosses that own the Hyades, and get them to call it off. Five hundred fifty lightyears away!” he breathed, awed by the audacity of it. It would be a thousand years and more to go and return, even if the Hermetic could attain the night-to-lightspeed velocity her name boasted, and, more difficult, descend back into the metric of normal space at the destination.

Yet if the calculations were correct that the Armada approaching Earth from Hyades was loitering at one tenth of one percent of lightspeed, such a round trip was feasible. It could be made before the Solar System fell.

But Rania said, “The Dominion of Praesepe is of no significance.”

Montrose took a moment to adjust to that comment. The entities who controlled a large fraction of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. No significance.

“Then where are we going?”

“To the throne of the overlords of their overlords.”

“To M3? What then? We’re going to stoke the Hermetic to ramming speed, and blow the wogs to smithereens with a filthload of antimatter, right? Niven’s Law says that any ship with enough power to step on the toes of lightspeed, that ship has enough power to fry a planet like an egg. Yeah. That’d make a right shiny firework.”

She actually laughed. Rania threw back her head and laughed a silvery laugh, and her earrings sparkled in the darkness with the motion of her golden head. “Darling! You simply must read the decryption. This civilization … these godlike beings … they occupy a globular cluster.”

“Well, that don’t mean…”

“Messier Object Three is their seat. M3 is made up of several hundred thousand stars. The whole star cluster shifts like a variable even over the course of a single night: countless stars of the RR Lyrae type are crowded in the center, and they can double in brightness in a few hours. If you refer to the Zeta Segment, which contains star descriptions, the Monument says the output variation is a pollution or by-product of their stellar engineering efforts, Dyson spheres choking or releasing excess radiation. And what we see now is borne on lightwaves issued thirty-three thousand years ago. They may have achieved more by now.”

“What if we used Earth’s whole supply of contraterrene?”

“Earth? My husband, if the whole of the Diamond Star V 886 Centauri were flung like an anarchist’s bomb into the core of the cluster, the energy discharge would be less than what we see as differences of output in the cluster stars in a single evening. Blow up a planet? It would be like rushing into a country of several hundred thousand households and shooting one man.”

He opened his mouth to say that, in the cartoons, the Star Fleets were always rushing across to Lundmark’s Nebula or whereverthehell to blow up the enemy homeworld—but he realized how infantile that would sound, so he just said crossly: “So fine. Then there’s no point to going. It’s too far, anyway.”

“A gentler way is open to us.”

“What way?”

“To prove our case in the court of heaven for the freedom of Mankind.”

“Go to them? The ones who said in their message that they owned us?”

“I have read the message of the Monument, and seen the truth that it contains. Now you and I must go, armed only with that truth, and face the alien stars, the Archons of the Orion Arm, and demand of them we must be free.”

“Why would they free us?”

“Their own laws compel it. Look at the math: a method of determining, in the aggregate and in the long term, the efficient from the inefficient rules of behavior.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they will treat us like wolves if we are wolves to them, but like men if we prove ourselves their equals. These values allow us to escape their Concubine Vector. Their own sense of efficiency will not allow them to waste a valuable resource. Read! In the Cold Equations of the universe the balance scale weighs our utility to them as subjects, less the risk and cost of conquest, against our utility to them as partners, less the risk and cost of cooperation. They have reduced these complex matters, which so bedevil the governments of Earth, to an algorithm. If we act as their equals, they must recognize us.”

“And what does it mean to be their equals?”

“It means to be a starfaring race.”

8. Aren’t We Now?

“Well, hurrah! We made it! Uh—” He saw the look on her face. “Didn’t we?”

“No.”

“We went to V 886 Centauri and back.”

“No. The expedition was a failure. Can’t you see that? We were attacked—attacked as if by pirates, when the Hermetic returned—by our own world. Our arrival overturned the customs and governments, which should, by rights, have been waiting to protect us, to assure us of our property, and to encourage others to dream of like ventures. Men are not starfarers yet.”

Menelaus noticed the implication: that it would be a social change, an evolution in laws and traditions, which would make the human race starfarers. But what nation, what institution, could last so long?

He said only: “And what do we have to do?”

“Mankind has to learn to plan ahead a thousand years or ten thousand, and carry out our plans. To be a starfaring race means to think in the long-term. Space is too vast, the stars are too far, for small or selfish calculation! No race can starfare that cannot keep its purposes fixed and unchanging over long years of time; nor join the rulers of the stars who cannot keep contracts faithfully across long lightyears of space. The short-term races cannot be partners in covenants or voices in the galactic conversation, only serfs: for they have not the attention span.”

Menelaus was silent, wondering, turning over the figures in his mind.

M3 was 33,900 lightyears away. If a man who did not need to eat or sleep started counting the second he saw a ship traveling lightspeed depart for M3, and that tireless man uttered one number every second of the day and night, he would count to a trillion before that number would pass. Including leap years, it would be 31,688 years, 269 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds. He would still have over 3 millenniums to count. That was the one-way trip. Even at the theoretical maximum of nigh-to-lightspeed, assuming no turn-around time, the soonest a verdict could return from M3 to Earth would be 67,800 years from now.

Sixty-seven thousand eight hundred years.

The figure was stunning. A.D. 70800. That is the earliest anyone on Earth would hear about the verdict. The Seven Hundred Ninth Century.

Montrose tried to think of a comparison. When did the Egyptians build the pyramids? No. That was roughly 2500 B.C.: less than a twelfth of the span of time being completed here. The amount of time to go and return from M3 was equal to from now to the middle of the Paleolithic, circa 60000 B.C. About when the first canoe was dug and arrowheads shaped into leaf points by flint napping were both still new-fangled things the old folk probably didn’t cotton to, but all the rage amoung the cave-boys.

“It is too damn far. Why not send a radio signal instead? Coherent light does not disperse or lose energy in a vacuum.”

“That would prove only that we are a signal-making race, not a starfaring race.”

He looked at the star-map notation again, revisualized it in another form. He was rather pleased with himself that he could picture more than a million discrete points, representing stars, and their relation to each other in time and space, in his eidetic memory. But he was also a little disappointed: he had been expecting a difference in the nature of his thought, not just in the speed and complexity.

Augmented intelligence seemed a small enough thing when compared with the terrifying grandeur of outer space. If anything, the greater sensitivity of his thoughts allowed him to truly understand the magnitude of what hitherto had been too astronomically huge to be meaningful. No, he could actually feel it, grasp it, and to know how microscopic a mote man’s world was in the void.

M3 was distant. It was farther away from Sol than the center of the galaxy was. If the galactic disk were laid out like a dinner plate, M3 would be like a dandelion puff floating almost directly above it. The Monument script gave figures (expressed in terms of the unit of the energy liberated from the fission of one hydrogen atom with an antihydrogen atom) for the power use of the civilization at M3, and the symbols hinted at some aspects of their technology.

Menelaus reminded himself that, in the language of astronomers, a star cluster was nothing like a globular cluster. Hyades and Praesepe were clusters: Hyades held perhaps four hundred stars, and in Praesepe, three hundred fifty were visible. Whereas a globular cluster was an immensity, typically holding half a million to a million stars. Globular clusters were scattered like flying sparks ranging far above and below the main disk of the galaxy. The zone where globular clusters were found occupied a sphere centered on the galactic core, composed of older stars of low metallic properties.

In a globular cluster, the stars were packed close. On average, one would be next to its neighbor no farther away than perhaps six times the radius of Neptune’s orbit, so the skies of any worlds in that crowded space would be densely filled with stars brighter than Venus at sunset, glowing clouds of light rather than scattered constellations. To the human eye, it would be a star dazzle too bright to stare at for long.

M3 had more variable stars than every other globular cluster in the galactic halo. The cluster included a large number of so-called Blue Stragglers, main sequence stars apparently much younger than the rest of the cluster: but only apparently. Macroscale Engineering had meddled with the core processes of the stars, throwing them out of their normal evolution.

The whole cluster of M3 stars was itself on an eccentric orbit around the galactic core, moving from 22,000 lightyears at galactic perigee, to 66,000 at galactic apogee. The orbit was canted oddly, to dip 44,000 lightyears above and below the main galactic plane.

Certain orbital elements and epochs given in the Monument revealed that the original orbit had been far more conservative, coplanar with the main disk of the galaxy. The reason for the massive orbital adjustment of this group of half a million stars was not revealed in the relatively crude mathematical sign-language being used.

The idea of a race that could casually sweep a globular cluster into a new orbit around the core of the galaxy left Menelaus awed and horrified.

The imagination of Menelaus for a moment was filled with a menagerie of cat-faced men, or centaurs, three-eyed people, hawk-men and crab-people and zebra-men, worm-creatures or intelligent trees, or dwarfish things with glowing eyes and ballooned skulls. But no: these were merely images from his childhood toon-tales. All that was revealed in the Monument hieroglyphs were energy levels, expressed in terms of multiples of the output of the Diamond Star, and additional mathematical expressions showing the composition of megascale engineering structures.

He told himself these beings could be something much stranger than his simple imaginings. Or even creatures to whom the question of form was meaningless: beings with a science to reshape their bodies and minds at will, to fit any task confronting them. Creatures of pure information.

But what tasks? What was this conquest for?

Montrose muttered, “These are beings of pure mind. Creatures beyond life. Something incomprehensible, someone from beyond the Asymptote. Beyond the event horizon of what we can ever understand. That’s the enemy.”

Rania surprised him by saying, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

In the moment before he recognized the source, he thought it might be Shakespeare, perhaps from some play where bold Scottish kings drew swords in defiance against tyrannical angels. He frowned when it dawned on him that it might be preacher-talk. But Menelaus noticed that hearing it in her dovelike voice, the Good Book seemed not to have that harsh tone, a weird combination of ghostly terror and dusty-hearted killjoy platitudes, it carried back in the days when his mother quoted it to him, or that lying no-account Parson Goodwin from Carl’s Corner in Hill County. It almost sounded like poetry.

“Quoting the scriptures?” he said. “And here I thought you were raised by scientists.”

She was too ladylike to snort, but she did made a noise of disdain in her nose, softer than the sigh of a nightingale. “Scientists including the Franciscan-trained Father Reyes y Pastor, who made sure we had onboard the same Bible Mendel, Copernicus and Lemaître studied.”

“Mass limits were tight,” said Montrose. “I was not even allowed to bring socks.”

“You think it an unnecessary luxury? I agree, the scriptures might have been no good for settling issues of astrophysics, but when I was told how my mother passed away, I read the Book of Job, and I looked down at the stars. This book asked me who laid the cornerstone of the cosmos when the morning stars sang together and what made the Sons of Light all shout for joy? It asked if I could bind the influence of the clustered Pleiades or free the bands of Orion?”

He saw a hint of sorrow in the shake of her silhouetted head. Rania continued, “Those questions comforted me in my grieving, even though I could not answer them; and the answers of science, firm and certain, could not. Through science I deduced, as you did, how I was born, but science, the mere study of matter in motion, will never tell me why.”

“Down at the stars?”

“Stars were never ‘up’ until I reached Earth; the ship carousel, spun for gravity, puts the portholes under your feet, and all the universe is a void to fall into.”

“You know your mom weren’t real.”

“Do mothers not love their stillborn child? I mourned her loss, even if she never lived.”

“You are strange girl.”

“Since you and I, and perhaps by now Ximen, are the only members of our new species, homo sapiens posthomonid, by any rational basis of comparison, not only am I average, I form the only data point.”

Montrose, rather than argue the point, bent his head over the bookpad and read her translation of line 2311 and 2312 of the Xi Segment.

THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE … WHEN FOUND AMONG STARS IN THE ORION ARM BETWEEN THE FOLLOWING EONS AND LOCATIONS [measurements were given in terms of multiples of plank lengths and fractions of proton-decay periods. The volume thus defined included Sol] … NECESSARY FOR SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION [meaning uncertain] … DONE AT THE BEHEST OF AUTHORITY OF M3 GLOBULAR CLUSTER, WHOSE [SERVANTS] DOMINION AT PRAESEPE CLUSTER ORIENT FINAL CAUSATION TO CONFORM TO THIS DIRECTIVE; WHOSE [PETS] DOMINATION AT HYADES CLUSTER PERFORM THE [INSIGNIFICANT] MANUAL LABOR INVOLVED.

“Let me get this straight. On Earth, ten thousand years go by before the little green men even show up. Then another Brazilian vermilion cotillion years go by before we get back from M3 with the court’s verdict. And we don’t know if the court will rule in our favor, because who’s to say their laws and whatnot will stay the same for so long?”

“They are starfarers: they must honor thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past a thousand lightyears. They must honor ten-thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past ten thousand lightyears. What is the upper radius value for the ambition of M3? We cannot say. But look: their name in this concept-writing means they extend in all directions without limit.”

He shook his head. “Let’s stick with our original plan. We go to the Diamond Star, no farther, gather up as much contraterrene as we can mine via star-lifting, return here, overthrow whatever stupid machine civilization Blackie has tried to set up—if it still exists, which I doubt—and start the long, slow process of building up the human race, and any posthuman races we might have the fancy to create, to fight the Hyades Armada. These equations are not only their advertisement of their intentions, they are also their marching orders—all we have to do is make the human resistance more expensive than it is worth to conquer us. Once there is no hope of profit, they’ll quit. I mean, aren’t we deciding everything on the assumption that these are machine civilizations, electronic brains that are forced to make judgments by these same calculations?”

Rania said, “If we make the human resistance more expensive, all they will do is extend the term of the indenture.”

“The Monument itself is millions of years old. The civilization at M3 could be long dead, or changed its laws, or fallen to war or—anything!”

“Nonetheless, in my capacity as Captain, this concerns matters beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and therefore falls into my jurisdiction.”

“I am not questioning the legality, but the judgment! Are you just acting on blind faith? What makes you think the monsters at M3 (a cloud of stars not even in this damn galaxy!) will respect what is written on that lump of rock circling the Diamond Star, or even be alive? Aren’t they changing and growing and dying, even if they are machine-things? What is your evidence?”

“The Monument expresses something never seen on Earth, a calculus of history, a science of which our economics and politics are mere unsystematic gropings, based on guesswork and sentiment. Their laws are deductions, not proscriptions, of how their future generations will and must behave, or, since they may long ago have solved the technical problems of decay and death, the future generations may be the selfsame individuals who wrote this promise.”

“But it could be a lie!”

“To what end? Why tell us the means of manumission if they meant us not to use it?”

“Hellfire! D’you expect me to understand how the bug-men living in pools of methane who eat their parents for lunch might think with their nine brains? What if it is fiction? A joke? Graffiti? A psalm in their religion that they only mean on Sunday? What if it is some emotion or custom or nerve-malfunction humans just don’t have that prompted them to write something for a reason we don’t and can’t understand?”

“The fact that the Monument itself is the product of a rational intelligence, a message deliberately set to be seen and read by all comers, allows us to suppose it means what it means until proven otherwise. Why do you assume the Armada from Hyades is real but deny that the Authority who can free us from the domination of the Armada is also real? Your skepticism seems to be unidirectional.”

“But that does not prove it!”

“Life is not a bench of law, nor a scientist’s workbench. We have partial information. A hint. A clue. Life allows us see a shadow in the darkness, and we must guess its true shape. But life forces us to decide, before we know with perfect knowledge, how we shall confront the unknown. Who gave you this foolish idea that evidence must be certain before it can be affirmed? Before us is the unknown. The universe is black and wide. The option to be all-knowing is not open to us. Our options are to act as if the unknown will bring us evil, which is the response called fear; or to act as if the unknown will bring us good, which is the response called hope. The first response is certainly self-fulfilling; the second may be.”

Montrose had no good answer for that, so he said, “It still sounds like blind faith.”

“Blind compared to what? All real life is decided by guesswork, intuition, judgment, determination, and not established by omniscience. Did you examine the future before you married me? Where is your evidence that our love will endure?”

“I fell in love. And I gave my oath. I will make it endure.”

“Well, I took an oath also, to find and carry out my purpose in life. Here I have found it. I will make the Authority at M3 to manumit the human race; I will make us starfarers. We will have the future, brilliant with glory, the human race has always dreamed of, and may yet deserve!”

He had no good answer for that, either, so he turned off the book and kissed her. He did not know if that would be the right thing to do, but he hoped it was.