Count to a Trillion

10

The Fatherhood of Man

1. The Secret of Youth

“So you don’t tell anyone you came back with the secret of eternal youth, eh?” said Montrose, feeling anger prickle him, despite his awe.

And indeed he was awed: whatever programmed cell-bodies were stored into their armbands had acted immediately upon entering their bloodstreams, and started issuing molecular commands to the bodily cells. Even their hair changed immediately, losing its gray throughout the length of each strand, rather than merely at the roots. Montrose could not fathom the speed of it: No biological process known to him would happen so quickly. Each cell must have been separately programmed with a dimorphism, trained to return to its youthful shape and consistency at the first trace of stimulant.

Melchor de Ulloa smiled ingratiatingly. “It is extended youth, but not eternal. A genetic form of divarication correction—an application of your own work to cellular biochemistry. You should feel proud!”

Montrose remembered the wrinkled face of old Doctor Kyi. “I’d feel a damn sight prouder if’n we’d’ve shared it.”

Reyes y Pastor said calmly, “The Learned Conclave thought it not in the bests interests of Mankind to preserve the present generation, and all its accumulated genetic flaws and primitive memes. Extending the aging process slows the evolutionary process, as the older bloodlines must give way before the new bloodlines can arise, improving the breed.”

The mention of breeding brought something to Montrose’s attention. He saw the similarity of features: olive-skinned, dark-eyed, Mediterranean. There was only one blonde in the room: the Engineer’s Mate Coronimas, whose fair hair was a genetic marker of ancient Norse conquests in Portugal.

All of Latino descent. In other words, only the Hispanospheric moiety of the joint expedition had returned. The mutiny had fractured loyalties along racial lines.

Ximen Del Azarchel touched Menelaus Montrose on the elbow and gestured toward the table. “Please sit. Join us.”

Montrose recognized the O-shaped table for what it was. It was the Table Round, the gathering of King Arthur’s knights, from the stories Del Azarchel so loved. Had he not, years ago, likened the Hermetic expedition unto knight errantry?

Except that this group seemed more a gathering of Mordreds than of Galahads.

Montrose pondered a moment, torn between hot anger and cold curiosity. Whatever crimes this group had committed, even if new to him, were years in the past. And they were his friends—he was a member of the crew, after all, a position he had worked so hard to achieve.

Perhaps he owed them a hearing. No point in storming out before he found out what they had to say. In any case, he had nowhere else to go, and the doors were sealed. And, dammit, he wanted to know what they knew!

He sat.

The seat was not particularly comfortable. He took a sip from his water glass. It was not particularly cold. Whatever the Hermeticists were up to, they certainly did not coddle themselves.

The meeting of these seventy-odd scientific overlords of the world seemed to be handled with less formality than Montrose had seen in town meetings of the eight selectmen back in Bridge-to-Nowhere. There seemed to be no minutes being kept, and no one serving as Chairman.

The first order of business was reviewing Montrose’s cure of the Iron Ghost. The event had been recorded from the sensitive fabric of the walls, from every possible angle.

2. Mr. Hyde

At first, the overhead plates showed Menelaus, looking sleepy, laying on the floor next to a white-haired Del Azarchel in the cold room, surrounded by the cylinders and cables snaking across the floor. A small silver cup had rolled from the fingers of the prone figure and lay in the floor in a puddle of alcohol—and presumably whatever had been mingled with the alcohol.

The image of Del Azarchel wheeled his throne over to a tiny doll-like Menelaus, and leaned down to help him to his feet. In small, tinny voices, he and Menelaus discussed the divarication problem. Menelaus seemed to be sleepy, perhaps drunk, and his head hung down. He was speaking slowly but normally, his expression and body language normal.

It changed slowly. Menelaus seemed to get more excited. He began pacing and gesturing wildly. His face almost glowed. And then the image of Menelaus was speaking rapidly, face flushed red as if from some terrible exertion. There was something hypnotic, sinister, in the clipped, rapid, uninflected way in which he spoke, as if he meant to speak much more rapidly.

While he spoke, he opened up more and more screens on the walls around him, and produced an image of the Monument around him. He was no longer talking to Del Azarchel, but only to the pallid mask that had appeared on a large rear screen.

The eyes were the worst part. During the first moment of the speech, while Menelaus stared at the images of the Monument all around him, the eyes had danced and darted like the eyes of a man having a seizure, moving from point to point restlessly, drinking in every scrap of visual information. Then they went dead. Like two burning points, the intense eyes held unnaturally still, as if the mind behind them had mastered the art of absorbing all the sights from its peripheral vision as if the brain was developed enough to compensate for any part of the arc of vision where the pupil’s lens was not turned by merely deduction. A creature too smart to need to look directly at what it was analyzing.

His face. There was … something … staring out at the world with burning, supernal eyes, using his face as a mask.

The human mask spoke to the computer mask, speaking in a singsong voice like garbled Chinese. He started leaping from screen to screen, wall to wall, and he shook off his outer coat. At about that point he drove the flesh-and-blood version of Del Azarchel out of the chamber.

3. The Testament of Crewman Fifty-One

Around the large circular table, one man after another spoke, apparently the chairmen of divisions or ad hoc committees for reports. Again, Montrose did not see who was deciding who had the floor. But he noticed that the young bloods, Del Azarchel’s clique from the old days, seemed to do most of the talking.

Narcís D’Aragó spoke in his thin, colorless, precise voice, “In this recording, Fifty-One said the Monument Builders use a simple bilateral symmetry for expressing alternative concepts, and a triangle to indicate paradoxes and synthetic relations. The major glyph on a circled triangle was the pain-pleasure statement, the alternatives of good and bad, success and failure: The entire forty-five-degree section of the Eta Segment (roughly from ten degrees to twenty-five degrees on the Monument surface) was a mathematical analysis of game theory. Previous translation attempts had foundered because expressions of preference had not been recognized.”

Montrose raised his hand. “Fifty-One? Is that what you are calling me?”

It had been his crew locker number, also painted in huge numerals on the front and back of his space armor.

Del Azarchel said in a meditative voice, “That is our name for the creature you accidentally created in your own nervous system, built from your own brain cells, from your own soul, however you want to say it. The Posthuman. It is still alive in your brain, though I think it is wounded.”

Montrose said, “Delta-wave sleep patterns wake it up, no? My dreaming cycle restores the being. It wakes when I sleep.”

“Interesting theory,” said Del Azarchel noncommittally.

“You doped me to wake it up. The other me—” He turned and smiled at Sarmento i Illa d’Or, showing his teeth. “—The one who bites.”

Sarmento looked sour and cracked his knuckles.

Del Azarchel said smoothly, “A medical sedative I had been asked to give you periodically. The event was fortuitous but somewhat unexpected, Learned Montrose. Perhaps something unexpected in your medical…”

“Unexpected? I just happened to go all possessed—or whatever it is called—just at the moment and in the place where it can do you the most good, just when I swallowed something you handed me? Jesus nailed up a tree, Blackie! Was that the only reason you cured me? I thought you were afraid of this Mister Hyde inside of me! Sounds like it is not so much dangerous as hard to get some use out of!”

Narcís D’Aragó said coldly, “Danger? We dread nothing.” Del Azarchel raised a hand an inch or two, and made a small gesture as if to shush D’Aragó, but the soldier raised his voice and spoke out. “No power can arise on Earth to oppose us: We are able to predict the coming of any potential threat to our reign, and destroy whoever refuses to be suborned.”

“And if I don’t agree to be—what was that word? Suborn? You talk like that’s a good thing. What if I don’t play along with your hand?”

D’Aragó did not answer, but looked aside.

“Well, tough guy?” said Montrose, “Are you going to beef me now? Or just ask me to commit suicide?”

There was a mutter of surprise around the great table, two and three voices speaking at once. “He has always been so cooperative before—” “God! I remember him from Camp now—how it comes back—do you remember the time he was drunk and—” “Always getting into fistfights—” “Unexpected. Is there was way to lobotomize just this version, and keep the rest of his brain intact, so the daemon might—”

On second thought, they sounded more indignant than surprised: as if a docile mule had dug in its heels and then talked up out of turn. Being shocked that a mule could talk is one thing. Being shocked that a mule would dare talk back is another.

Father Reyes y Pastor tapped his red metal armband to the tabletop, so it made a ringing, piercing noise like wineglass tapped by a fork: “The Chair will entertain a motion that thread of the discussion be tabled until other matters are settled.”

There was a murmur of agreement. “Call the question!” “Seconded.” “Move acclamation.” “Seconded.” Montrose sank back in his chair, grimacing. Apparently the meeting was informal until someone wanted to silence him, whereupon Robert’s Rules of Order appeared out of nowhere.

Reyes y Pastor—looking like he, not Del Azarchel, was the Chairman here—turned and spoke across the table to Montrose. “We are using a Linear Calculus priority structure to track the conversation topics. A variable will be assigned your question, and you can keep an eye on the time value.”

Father Reyes pointed up at one of the screens, which showed a branching tree, each twig marked with a bookmark of one part of the conversation or another. So someone was keeping minutes after all. Montrose had seen prioritization calculus used in math problems, but never applied to the problem of how to keep the separate topic-threads of a meeting in order.

Montrose said, “Wait. What question? What the hell are we talking about later? Blackie here rogering with me, or do y’all think you are going to talk about me getting killed or lobotomized later? And what, vote on it or something? Bugger that! Whatever those red bracelets pump into your bloodstream must be damn stronger than whiskey, I can tell you.”

No one answered his comment. The conversation had returned to Montrose’s recorded speech. They discussed the clues that Montrose—or Crewman Fifty-One—had uttered, and how each fit into their latest research. But now an image of the Monument appeared in the depth of the library cloth paving the wide central space the table surrounded.

He found the technical conversation so thoroughly sweeping up his interest, that he did not notice his suspicions and his anger being pushed into the back of his mind.

The discussion scrutinized what Montrose had said to the Iron Ghost, the various possible translations of the (apparently impromptu) languages involved. What could be deciphered was compared to the latest research on Monument translation, the findings of all the years Montrose had slept through.

That the Beta Segment was a star-map, for example, had long been known, but not until Montrose and the Iron Ghost had discovered the key to reading it, had it become legible.

Acre upon acre of the information was suddenly opened to the gaze of the Hermeticists. They put the Monument glyphs through various simple algorithms years of research had developed, planes and cubes of visual maps unfolded in the floor underfoot, or along the screens overhead. Files from the mind of the Iron Ghost had been rendered into digital form, and were open to examination. Since the Iron Ghost was Del Azarchel, his memory held the leading edge of human research and theory, and he had applied the tools long developed by the expedition and by Earthly universities to translate the Monument.

“The Encyclopedia Galactica!” breathed Montrose.

More data than one man could comb through in a lifetime was unfolding on their computer screens: stars were listed by mass, luminosity, radius, orbital elements (both for other stellar bodies in multiple star systems, and for the wide, slow courses around the galactic center), metallicity, chemical concentrations, electron-degenerate matter concentrations, stellar evolution characteristics on something remarkably like a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and a set of symbols related to something else. It was the same symbol used elsewhere to refer to intelligence, or intelligence concentration. The stars were apparently rated by I.Q.

But this was the least part of the Beta Segment. Interestingly, the Monument Builders had been less interested in the positions of stars than in the distribution of various rogue planets, interstellar asteroid swarms, and the density of interstellar gasses and particles. Just based on the numbers the map tracked, it seemed as if most multiple star systems lost their planets along hyperbolic orbits during their formation in the stellar nurseries of the great nebular clouds. According to the Beta Segment information, more worlds existed outside solar systems than in, endless numbers of gas giants and failed stars, their great envelopes of heavy atmosphere long ago turned to ice in the dark.

Montrose shivered at the idea of so many sunless worlds. The universe was a strange place after all.

The Eta Segment was game theory mathematics. The Theta Segment was a legal statement, a set of equations dealing with political relationships, defining a field of cooperative and conflictive relations. Symbol theta-six 101 through 202 was one symbol, their concept for domination, or power imbalance.

The next group was a calculus. It was literally the calculus of power. It showed in a few cold equations what happens in a formal game when the weaker player has nothing whatever to offer the stronger player.

The next file from the Iron Ghost showed the application of the cold equations to the values that could be deduced for Earth at its current level of racial intelligence, energy use, and fineness of technical manipulation. It was an equation defining, for any given expected advantages, when contact across interstellar distances was economically feasible and when it was not: in other words, how near another civilization had to be to shoulder the expense and risk of sending a vessel across the intervening distance, given the expected lifespan of the civilization, and other variables.

For the Monument math had analytical methods to reduce all these things to expressions. All the complexity and delicacy of human civilization, all art and romance and inventions: The invisible hand of statistical analysis smoothed out all those variations, all that richness, into a grindingly simple spline expression.

Over the immense ranges, distances, and time-intervals that governed interstellar power relations, nothing that made human life and civilization unique mattered. If it was not worth taking centuries of time to cross lightyears of space to get, as far as the cold equations were concerned, it did not exist.

The basic theme of the opening statement of the Alpha group was portrayed again in the Kappa group, distorted by a transformation sequence. By the grammar rules of the Monument, this returned the statement to the beginning again: reduced it to the life-death, either-or choice.

Earth obeyed or died. The volume of the obedience latitude was controlled by the cold equations of interstellar power.

“The Diamond Star is just a baited hook?” Menelaus tried to imagine what kind of race had such resources at its command that it could create such an immense, and immensely useful, source of energy, and merely leave it planted in space scores of lightyears from home.

“A ‘watering hole’ is what you called it,” said Melchor de Ulloa. His features were handsome and youthful once more. “The predators dug a watering hole, knowing the prey would come out of the jungle to drink.”

“It’s ridiculous!” said Montrose, his voice a blend of fear and outrage. “That’s just bull … gotta be … a race that advanced … peaceful trade would make more sense, cost less?… No bloodshed … they have the basic equations of game theory written out right here! Everyone wins, a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum … it can’t be … must have read it wrong! There is a lot more to the Monument than just those symbol groups! The whole Southern Hemisphere of the Monument, we don’t have a single line translated! And what kind of damn useless warning sign is that? Danger! By the time you read this, it is too late. But if they can make a star out of antimatter—and don’t tell me a contraterrene-matter star in a terrene-matter galaxy is not artificial! That’s a feat of engineering God himself could not do!—If they can do that, why would they bother with us? With such wealth and such power—”

Melchor de Ulloa shook his head, smirking. “Never trust the rich.”

Montrose saw in the corner of his eye, on one of the overhead screens, the branches of the conversation tree dividing and changing color. But the Hermeticists had their hands folded, left over right, their fingers not touching on the control surfaces of their red amulets. Who was prioritizing the conversation?

Del Azarchel said softly, “Even with such wealth and power, they are limited by the strictures of economics, of game theory, of time, space, and distance.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said heavily, “Why this message? Why bother with such a warning? Why go to the immense, the unthinkable expense?”

Del Azarchel said, “I know a little bit about game theory myself. The easiest way to win in a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ type situation is to have a retaliation strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent over time: in this case, very long times indeed, measured in millennia. It has often been speculated that any star-faring intelligences would have to be either very long-lived beings, or possess very long-lived social structures.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “We have the age estimates for when the Monument was built. Millions of years ago. Who would bother putting up a warning sign so old? And who could believe the Monument Builders are still around to act out their threat? If they are as old as the dinosaurs, they are most likely as extinct as the dinosaurs.”

Reyes y Pastor said, “What slew the dinosaurs? An asteroid? An ice age? Suppose the Monument Builders could swat aside an extinction-level asteroid as easily as a mother brushing a fly from her sleeping child, or adjust the climates of worlds as if with a thermostat—assuming they chose to tarry on a world at all. Once a posthuman civilization gains control of all of nature, no natural disaster can destroy it. And if their wisdom grows with their power, no artificial disaster either.”

Del Azarchel said, “This span of years seem large to us. Does it seem large to them? What if the races of the Hyades are ten or a hundred times that age? In the long, slow process of cosmic evolution, only the most conservative of races, intelligences whose ways are set in adamant, could arrive at a First Contact strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent. Gentlemen! We are dealing with beings that think in the very long term. A thousand years to them are as a day. Why wouldn’t they broadcast their plans to all and sundry? Why does the lion roar? We are conditioned to think of war as a matter of stealth, because we live in an age when we can drop antimatter onto enemy airspace, and annihilate all life. But this is not war. This is a shepherd announcing to a wolfpack planet that we must either become his sheepdogs or be slain as vermin.”

Montrose disagreed. “But you’d think these—powers—would be smart enough to figure out that mutual cooperation is better than conquest!”

Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure, old friend. Of what benefit would have been the Aztecs to the Spanish Empire, had they flourished? Do you think our race is evolved enough to dwell in peaceful cooperation with these beings, these star-makers?”

Narcís D’Aragó said dispassionately, “Actually, Learned Del Azarchel, the mutual benefit is taken into account in the expression in the Theta Group of symbols. Look at these functions here and here—” Images of the Monument math, sine waves and hieroglyphs, appeared on the overhead screen, and next to them human math expressions, letters in Roman and Greek. “The sheepdog certainly benefits from being tamed by the shepherd, who looks to his care and feeding. The mutual benefit is merely not based on mutual consent.”

Reyes y Pastor said softly, “They could not ask for our consent in any case.”

Montrose barked, “Why not?”

Aloofly, Reyes y Pastor smiled. “To whom would the intellects of the Hyades Cluster address their inquiry? Suppose they sent a radio message yesterday. It would arrive one hundred fifty years from now. Suppose the generation at that time agreed to some proposal, entered into a contract or a covenant. In three hundred years the Hyades stars have their answer. They dispatch a ship moving, say, at one-tenth the speed of light. It arrives nine millennia of years from now—the same amount of time as divides us from the Mesolithic Era.”

He paused as if to savor the magnitude of the interval.

Then Reyes y Pastor continued: “Would our remote descendants actually be so honest and honorable that they would pay a debt the hunter-gatherer older than the Abel who first domesticated the ox had pledged? Or take possession of goods which the husbandman older than some Cain who gathered lentils and almonds in the Franchthi Cave in Argolid once contracted with the star-beings to buy, or the magician older than Enoch who painted shamanic images on the cave walls of Lascaux?”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or sat at the table like a black mountain, powerfully-built and with a voice to match, like a subterranean rumble: “Learned Montrose, from your speech—the speech of your otherself, I mean—we can conclude that this group of symbols, 113 through 151, in the Kappa area represented the racial intelligence quotient of the Hyades Cluster, measured by the amount of matter and energy in their environment they could reorganize to their use over time. You and the Xypotech machine compared it to world energy use, to global industrial output on Earth. You put us at four times ten to the twentieth power, at four exajoules per year; they—the Hyades Domination—ranked fourteen orders of magnitude above that, at around three hundred million yottajoules per year. I, that is, we did not necessarily agree with the idea of measuring intelligence by energy consumption, because the, ah, theoretical framework, that is to say … but you were not exactly in a position to discuss, uh, the details…”

“You could ask Blackie to dope me up again,” snorted Montrose. “But of course I’d bite. Where y’all keep the ketchup?”

“I have a question for the Learned Montrose,” Narcís D’Aragó broke in. “The difference in what we can call the racial intelligence quotient defines the relative utility of the Client species, Man, to the Patron species, the Hyades Domination, is expressed in this formula.” A touch on his bracelet made certain of the floor symbols brighten for emphasis. “The delta of the relative utility defines the curve expressing minimal–maximum cost-efficiency for dispatching the World-Armada. That is expressed here, the political game-theory expressions. The Beta Section of symbols which describes the galaxy, apparently has additional figures, a type of star-map, showing the lines of communication, the orbits of incoming fleets or travel routes or something of the sort, reaching from Epsilon Taurus in Hyades to Sol. The value—if we are translating the figures correctly—equals the mass of the gas giant astronomers detected in orbit there. Perhaps that is a vessel, not a gas giant. Or perhaps the gas giant was to be totally converted to fuel to launch flotillas of smaller vessels this way. The symbol did not distinguish between mass and energy. I am wondering on what grounds you concluded their launch date? Apparently there is a formula in here determining not just the date, but the composition of the Armada, its acceleration—how did you deduce it?”

“The composition? That I don’t know. One of those expressions is their launch-energy calculation. We can deduce the energy-volume and intelligence of whatever is being sent against us. A small flotilla of very large ships or a very large flotilla of small ships, it is all the same as far as the total mass-energy of useful weaponry is concerned. It could be a gas cloud or a dirigible gas giant. Doesn’t matter. We know the total. The number is large.”

“And the launch date?”

“It can be calculated from their expression controlling our value to them.”

“What is our value to them? What do they want with us? Do you remember?”

“No, I—wait—” He started to speak, but stopped. Because he did remember.

His eyes grew round.

4. Memory Fragment

He would have expected their symbol for the Milky Way galaxy to be a double spiral. It was not. The position of the visible suns in the arms of the galaxy was not what the Monument Builders had emphasized as the identifying symbol: Instead it was a Cartesian square of text, showing the black-body radiation wavelengths of the gravitational centers of the galaxy, with an additional ring of symbols which could deciphered into the absorption characteristics and geometry of the gas cloud surrounding the Milky Way and her gravitationally-trapped neighbors. In his mind’s eye, Montrose converted the glyphs in the Zeta Segment into a map that could visualize in crisp detail. To the Monument Builders, the galaxy was not a double spiral of light, but a black doughnut with a dark heart.

It was easy to assign a fragment of his mind to the task of detecting the pattern in the strings of number-symbols. The fourth degree expressions were the six parameters of orbital mechanics, which identified specific stars. The fifth degree gave not orbits, but acceleration and decelerations of moving bodies.

The stars of the Hyades Cluster were shown swinging along in the great orbits around the core of the galaxy. Here was Sol, tracing out another orbit. Chains of acceleration and deceleration, like threads of a spiderweb, reached through the diagram. A set of lines connected the two: the path elements of a coming armada.

Other mathematical expressions described volumes of spheres, expanding from certain centers over time. Here were equations he recognized as hierarchical cascade functions.

Even in his superior state of mind, he was not immune to fear. If anything, the sensation was sharper, more precise, scalpel-like, because he saw more of the implications, more possible dangers, than his sleepwalker mind.

That equation was divarication function applied to governing systems, to prevent orders from being mutated and misinterpreted when passing from decision-centers to action. The theorem could apply to any information system, the core in a computer, the brain in an organism, the court of a sovereign …

It was a pantomime in mathematical sign language to show the size and boundaries of the movements of human populations into the stars, the degree of control.

The equations taken all together, smaller symbols insider larger ones which in turn were written in lines and shapes to form larger symbols yet, all were rich with meaning. If put into words, it would have said:

THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE WHEN FOUND DISQUIETING THE MAGNETOSPHERE OF THE ANTIMATTER STAR AT V 886 CENTURI TO BE RESTRICTED TO THE STATUS OF NEGATIVE-POWER IMBALANCE, HENCE ARE CLIENTS (PASSIVE RECEPIENTS OF ACTION) OF THE ACTIONS OF DOMINANT POWER (HYADES CLUSTER). IF DETERMINED TO POSSESS SUFFICIENT UTILITY TO BE HELD IN INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE TO THE IMPERATIVES DESCRIBED IN THE FOLLOWING EQUATIONS … ALL OTHER OPTIONS ARE SUBJECT TO RETALIATION OF THE FOLLOWING MAGNITUDES … PAIN IS THE DETERRENT OF NONCOMPLIANCE, INCLUDING CESSATION OF MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS DEATH …

Then came a group of symbols he could not read. But the next group after that he was able to convert into a star-chart using the same semi-automatic “idiot savant” segment of his mind as read the greater galactic map. He could read the star-chart and accompanying legend.

DEATH … CASUALTY RATES OF NINE OUT OF TEN ARE EXPECTED AND ACCEPTABLE … FIRST DERACINATION SWEEP … SOL, ALPHA CENTAURI, 36 OPHIUCHUS, OMICRON ERIDANI, 61 CYGNI, 70 OPHIUCHUS, 82 ERIDANI, ALTAIR, DELTA PAVONIS, EPSILON ERIDANI, EPSILON INDI, ETA CASSIOPEIAE, GLIESE 570, HR 7703, TAU CETI …

5. Deracination

That was what he remembered. But nothing was clear. He could not summon back the equations themselves. Inside the hollow circle of the Table Round, the Monument underfoot remained meaningless to him, a chaotic fractal pattern triangles and curves, sine waves and Celtic knots. The crystal clarity of thought could not come back to him.

And he was thinking: Sleepwalker mind? Is that what you think of me? Damn you. Come out of my skull and say that to my face! Our face … um. Aw, pox on it.

Montrose repeated to the Hermeticists the message he recalled, the stars from the star-map. The dark chamber was as silent as a winter morning. They listened without moving.

He said, “They mean to sweep us up like seeds and plant us as colonists on other worlds, places we now know there are semi-earthlike bodies. It is forced migration on a massive scale: The figures involve populations in the billions … but the whole thing is crazy. I must have read it wrong! Why not use their own people? What advantage be there to them to move us to other worlds? It would be like the British transporting Australian Aborigines to Ireland.”

Del Azarchel said, “You said they were machines. Do you remember why? What part of the symbolism shows that?”

Montrose shook his head. “I ain’t sure. I reckon that was just me trying to simple-up things for the yahoo in the room. The difference between biological, biochemical, electronic, or neuro-electronic information systems, at that level of civilization—no difference, is it? Once you can rebuild yourself from the molecular level up, and out of any substance you fancy, soft or hard, stored as a pattern in a mainframe or spun out into any form of matter need calls for—no such thing as machines you can properly call by that name. It’s all alive. Or all dead.”

Del Azarchel said, “Is that something the Monument says? Or is that your speculation?”

“Look yonder. The nine recurring cycles in the Mu and Nu acreage of symbols—obviously meant to be read as one group, not two—the Monument Builders had an expression for the volume of information content in circulation in the combined mental systems of a civilization. It expresses nested topographies of ever-increasing levels of Superintelligence. From their point of view, the mental systems, computers and computer-engineers, libraries and librarians, is all one thing. One system, at least as far as their calculus is concerned. A Noösphere.”

Montrose pointed at the Monument image shining on the floor. “There. I think the mind-body expression is addressed in the main sequence of the Omicron group, which looks so weirdly like an E8 classification of complex simple Lie algebras. I ain’t surprised if the relation of self-awareness to inanimate matter falls into a that yonder root lattice: We’d expect any semiotic system to have the properties of trivial center, simply connected, and simply laced.”

He stared at the swirls and knots of the nonlinear writing system, trying to grasp the elusive half-forgotten thought.

“If I am right, the mind-body expression applies to any race, any planet, any form of intelligence anywhere. It is the nature of intelligence itself. The way matter encodes thoughts. Of course, I suppose anyone building a monument like this, a universal message meant to be read by any form of intelligence that blind and crazy Mother Nature can invent, the Monument Builders just have to have a firm understanding of the nature of the mind. They’d have to, wouldn’t they? Otherwise, there couldn’t be no monument to build.”

Father Reyes said delicately, “The yahoo?”

Montrose blinked as if waking from a trance, and stared at the other man uncomprehendingly. “Beg pardon?”

“You said you were trying to simplify things for the yahoo. Who is that?”

“Oh. That monkey thing that was in the room I was at. I am not sure what it was doing there, but it left once Del Azarchel and I started talking. It was in a little cart. I remember wondering if the creature had been brought from a zoo, or was a pet of Del Azarchel.…”

Reyes y Pastor gave a grim and ironic little smile. “It was Del Azarchel.”

“What? No. I remember talking with Del Azarchel. About the Monument.”

“You were talking with Del Azarchel’s model. The yahoo was the real Del Azarchel. That is what humans look like to the Posthuman, to the daemon, living in your head.” He uttered a chuckle, seeing the look on Menelaus’s face. “I do not mean you are possessed! In that same way that Socrates had a driving voice that compelled him to scale the slopes of highest thought, what he called his daemon, you have a daemon in you. It is benevolent, I am sure. Somewhat benevolent.” Reyes y Pastor turned to the group. “We have heard from this primitive version of the most Learned Menelaus Montrose. Is there anything more to be gleaned from him?”

A murmur ran through the chamber. Montrose saw the overhead screens record a vote of “nay.”

Reyes y Pastor continued mildly. “Then let us by all means move to the main business of the Conclave. I am assuming we all favor the creation of forms of intelligence to surpass Man. May I call the question?”

Another murmur of assent. There was no debate on the point: The screens overhead flashed a vote of “aye.”

Montrose was staggered by the overweening pride of it all. The Hermeticists fully intended to guide human evolution through the next eight millenniums of time.

But then he reflected. The threat from the Hyades was so remote in space, so far off in time, that only the most audacious plans could now be dreamed that might one day, centuries and millenniums hence, be fruitful.

And, come to think of it, what else could the Xypotech be meant to do? Montrose imagined hundreds, or thousands, of buildings housing these vast minds, fortresses and warehouses and factories of them, stretching from sea to sea, across Asia, across the sea-bottoms, orbiting in vast flotillas between Earth and Moon—and perhaps someday—the machines of man would make other machines to make other machines yet, years and centuries and generations of work. Would it be enough to mount a defense for the humans left on the green surface of the world? Could the Solar System be made into a fortification vast enough to hinder, slow, and fend off what came across the darkness from the Hyades? What kind of navy would match the godlike alien power? What kind of weapons? What kind of minds would be smart enough?

The vision startled him. Perhaps the Hermeticists were right to think big. Thinking small would not solve a problem like this.

Montrose snapped back to the present moment, wondering at what he had just heard.

Father Pastor had spoken: “We are crippled by a lack of data. Fortunately, we have exactly one prototype working model of a Posthuman consciousness as our ally! Therefore the chair will entertain a motion to put the question of the best design for a race to supplant Man to our own Crewman Fifty-One, whose usefulness to the Conclave in times past has proven itself.”

Montrose was frozen in that hush of shock that comes as a prologue to outrage. He could not believe such an idea could be proposed in such bland tones. The nodding and whispering faces around the table were blank and bored. To them the notion was routine.

Reyes y Pastor was still talking. “Her Serene Highness has made it clear that she wishes no one to interfere with the delicate neural surgery done so far, and yet I think we must discuss the possibility of, ah, a second medical intervention to waken the other Montrose, the daemon, to learn what we can from him. The floor is open to whomever wishes to speak.”

“I damn well wish to damn well speak, you pustulating bastard.”

Montrose stood up. He was not doing this to make himself look imposing (although this did) but to allow him to draw his heavy dirk from where it was tucked behind the folded of cloth of the long hood hanging down his back. He casually put one hand behind his back, and felt the grip of the knife handle.

The rational part of his mind told him he could not escape from a locked chamber with seventy-one men, now young and strong, and with who-knew-what additives and accelerants coursing through their bloodstreams, or tweaked into their nervous systems. Only Narcís D’Aragó was visibly carrying a weapon, but Montrose assumed the others were armed as well, because in their situation he would have been. So he told the rational part of his mind to shut up.

“What in the world, or in hell, make you gents think you got any right to say what happens to me? You thinking of tinkering with my brain without my say-so? My damned brain?! Sounds like you done it before. Did I help you conquer the Earth? I doubt y’all were cunning enough to do it by your own poxy selves. Did I help kill off the Captain, you hellbound traitorous mutineers? Well, I am not helping you again! I’ll see you in perdition being rogered by the scabby blue member of Old Nick first! And—”

And he stopped because the Hermeticists seemed startled. Startled at him? No. To judge by their expressions, they had already dismissed anything he was going to say. He was just a donkey in their eyes, a body that carried around the useful daemon of Mr. Hyde.

Was there something else in the room? He looked left and right only with the corners of his eyes, not moving his head. Yet he saw nothing that had not been there a moment ago. He looked up.

The screen showing the many-branching conversation tree had shot out a new thread or two, and the colors changed as a previous conversation was prioritized—the bookmark for the comment where D’Aragó had mentioned how they could destroy anyone they could not suborn, when Montrose asked if they meant for him to kill himself—that was now lit up in red, and had the floor.

Montrose noticed something odd. No one seemed to have his hand on his red control amulet at that moment. Some of the Hermeticists were reaching into their suits, no doubt for pistols, others had their hands on their chair-arms, and were rising to their feet.

Who had pushed the button to change which topic? The screen notation that held the minutes of the meeting was now marked as Speaker X. Who was X? According to the mark, it was someone waiting to speak. Someone not in the room, watching remotely.

The Hermeticists were motionless as hares.

Montrose licked his lips. The only person he could think of who was not here was the Princess Rania. He said, “I yield the floor to the next speaker for one minute, for a comment or a motion.”

A voice rang out like a cold bell of iron.

It was not the Princess. It was not even remotely human. But it was Del Azarchel’s voice.

Learned members of the Conclave! Until such time as you recognize me as the Senior Officer of the Landing Party, I can serve you only in an advisory capacity. I have made a preliminary model of Montrose/Daemon double-consciousness, and compared it with your previous library of cliometric calculations, extrapolating the possible action to a time-depth of eight thousand years.

The findings agree with my own sense of judgment. Montrose, whether in Human or Posthuman form, will not cooperate with our endeavors.