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.”