She shook her face to clear it, and Menelaus found the sight adorable, like a surfacing mermaid shaking spray free from her features.
Or like a sorceress. Her twinkling Tinkerbell-sized fliers were darting here and there in midair, destroying camera ladybugs, or driving them out of the slowly-closing door. He did not even mind that she plucked the half-consumed cigarette from his hand and had her dragonflies carry it out the door for her, and toss it away.
“Ventilation performance,” she said.
“We’re aground,” he said. “Air is free on Earth.”
“But why fall into bad habits? No tobacco is allowed aloft.”
The door shut, the night-breeze stilled. Menelaus then and there decided the prettiest sight on earth was that of a girl tucking her hair behind her ear.
“Are you talking about going into space again?” A strange, a wild hope rose in his breast even as he said it. But then he shook his head, doubting. “I read some of Blackie’s books. He daren’t let the Hermetic leave the system, since it is his pistol pointed between the eyes of the world. And he daren’t let another manned expedition go the Diamond Star, because that expedition, when it returned, would come back with another pistol as large. They’d pay back his heirs in his own ugly coin—with enough money to buy or bomb the world, a world where all they knew and loved would be long dead. As for the Bellerophon, right now she’s got canisters strapped like bananas to the main keel for the construction crew, but that is going to all be stripped off and fall back home once the machine installation is complete. But no people are invited on that vessel. Men are too dangerous to trust going to go fetch the dangerous stuff in the Diamond Star.”
She just shook her head. “I will not think that way, and shall not understand those who do. Should two mites on the ear of an elephant bite each other to death, when the elephant is plunging off a cliff’s brink? You asked of me what I wanted killed. Are you willing to enter the lists?”
“Fight a duel? My dad would have approved. He thought womenfolk should talk that way. But you—you’re not serious.”
“I am.”
“You got armies. And a ship. You’re a princess.”
“I am a woman, and a young woman, and armies cannot grapple this foe of mine. My enemy is not a thing of flesh and blood. The mystery of that Monument is my dragon. It will devour me if I am not saved.”
“The Monument?”
“Can you read it?”
It was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life.
Menelaus was astonished at how evenly and calmly the words rolled off his tongue, “Ma’am, I can read that damn Monument for you, if anyone on Earth can.”
2. The Logic Behind Logic
The corridor was lit, but was not exactly bright. Candles, good old-fashioned pre-Edison candles, stood on small tables every ten paces or so, between antique suits of gold-chased armor, or glass cases containing china curios or silver cups. Behind each candle was a dark drape, evidently meant to preserve the wallpaper from smoke stains. The buttery-gold light breathed and lived, and made the hallway into an elfin place, alive with shadows.
Without a further word, she reached over and tapped one of the mirrors facing the corridor. It was smartglass, just as back in Blackie’s chalet, and an image of the Xi Segment of the Monument came up in the view.
The right window showed differential equations from the Divarication Theory; the left showed the symbol-groups of the Xi-wave function-group being organized into a matrix. This left window was connected by little red threads to show which symbol in the matrix represented which Monument sign. More than one information view of the process was displayed: one was a branching tree, one was a rippling set of Venn diagrams, like a rainy pond, one was a polar axis view, one was a Cartesian diagram, one was a basic-grammar theory spiderweb.
When the matrix was entirely filled in, the information began to sequence itself. One pattern after another was superimposed on the various trees and ponds and spiderwebs, and where there were partial matches, the letters to the right lit up with colors, matching a color-coded version of the Monument symbols.
“I know that sequence,” said Montrose. “I designed it. That is what I had the Zurich computer use to go through the alien math, to make the codes to establish the nerve-channels in my brain.”
“But what does the Xi Segment express?”
“I don’t know. I just copied it.”
“Compare the table results. Everything the Monument says, it says in repeating patterns. Logic in the Opening Statements underpins mathematics according to the Russell-Whitehead meta-language, which is in the Gamma Segment. Mathematics in the Alpha Segment underpins geometry and physics, the sections labeled Alpha 357 to Beta 120. Game-theory in Eta underpins economics in Theta. So then, what underpins the basic statements of logic? You see? Compare this here to those untranslated expressions in the first two bands of the Monument pole. They come before the scientific statements, the periodic table, or the Maxwell equations. Assume these are metaphysical expressions, needed to explain and justify the basic physics here, symbols written in a pattern we humans cannot grasp, because the physical roots of the laws of physics are unknown to us.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“We have yet to deduce a logical system proving the physical constants of the universe must be those of our cosmos, and none other. Obviously these are matters physics cannot address, since empiricism can only examine the universe we have before us. So, the physics of before physics: I would call it meta-physics, but the word is taken. Let us call it Axiomatics, the justification of fundamental physical constants.”
“So they know the basic rules for why the universe is the way it is and not some other way. So what?”
“So I suggest the symmetry is maintained for the Mu-Nu Group over here. I suggest to you that these groups of expressions are, as the Monument Builders are great lovers of symmetry, the meta-logical expression: a symbolic code for the expression that would justify the basic rules of logic. The basic rules for why the mind is as it is and not some other way.”
“That makes no sense. You cannot use logic to justify logic. Either you assume the rule work, or you’re an ass. Um, pardon my…”
“The meta-logic rules, I am saying, do not use logic to justify the axioms of logic logically—as you correctly point out, that would be a paradox. But what is the underpinning for logic in the ultimate sense?”
“It works.”
She smiled graciously. “Many philosophers believe this indicates an intimate connection between the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics, and the way the human mind works. Odd, is it not? In an infinite universe, why would we just so happen to evolve brains that could comprehend the laws that just so happen to underpin the physical universe?”
“Not so odd. I’ll tell you why. Natural selection and the damn fool common sense God gave a goose. Lookit here: Animals who thought is was the same as is not might think a predator what is about to eat them up, is not about to dine so fine, and then the natural difference between is and is not would be clear as either-or: namely either you vamoose out from those sharp teeth, or you’ll be an is not in no time.”
“Nicely spoken, but you are familiar with Divarication theory. You are one of its primary authors, are you not? Put any information value you wish into the expression for whatever gene controls the organism’s logic. Somewhere in the little bits of matter that make us up, is something written in our DNA—think of it as a symphony written in a chemical code of four notes—somewhere is the arpeggio that programs us to believe A is A. Estimate the volume needed to carry that abstraction forward between all the generations of organisms possessing neural systems since the pre-Cambrian. Look at how the figure falls out.”