The sensation of her silken glove on his hand sent a curious ripple up his arm.
This is it. He thought. I am falling in love. Or I got the stomach flu.
He breathed deeply. Her loveliness was an aura around her, a warmth, a perfume. He walked, feeling like a bull being led by the nose-ring by some slender farm girl. The strength in her arm surprised him: there was lioness muscle under that soft skin.
And she was another man’s girl! He hated himself, at least a little bit, at the thought of being a poacher, and he hated himself again for not hating himself more. But in the back of his mind, he thought it as clear as day that Blackie did not deserve her.
But the strength of his own infatuation puzzled him. He had seen pretty women before—no one fell in love that fast, just in the twinkling of an eye. But she had been in his mind since first he saw her portrait at Blackie’s. Why did she look so … familiar? He felt in his heart as if he already knew her.
She was not leading him back into the ballroom, but down the balcony to a smaller door to one side. The half-invisible soldiers softly opened the door for them. The soldiers did not enter, but stayed behind.
Beyond was a corridor, one he had not seen coming in, wainscoted in highly polished wood up to waist-high, and above that, an intricate wallpaper in blue with gold highlights, a motif of lianas, leaves, and lilies.
As she crossed the threshold, she touched the ruby that rested between her breasts. It must have been a control surface, because up from her coiffeur, glittering like dragonflies, rose a swarm of tiny, winged machines. Her hair came undone, and formed a momentary cloud of scented gold around her face. It was not that the strands were weightless in the night-breeze around her, but Menelaus had a ghost of a memory in his mind that it should have looked that way.
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.”