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 though 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.”