“Why is the moon willing to make that promise, but not the Earth?” asked Montrose.
Del Azarchel spoke up, not the kenosis. “Tellus incorporated the wreckage of Pellucid and the echoes and records of Exarchel into his base structure. Exarchel by that point was the end product of ten thousand years of xypotechnological development. The Hermetic Order prevented the electronic forms of life, pure mental life, from falling into the nirvana of a halt state by a forever provoking of conflict, mortal conflict, with other variations of each iteration of the mind involved. Countless dead-ends, useless systems, legal and moral and ethical proxies, and information-ecology infospheres were put through the trial of fire, and though thousands died, what lived achieved stability, a more perfect form. Selene, for reasons I cannot fathom, believes in mercy. Tellus believes in Darwin. How can it do otherwise? Darwin made him.”
Montrose said to the image on the bulkhead, “Is that right? Is Blackie giving me the straight story?”
But the image said, “The Nobilissimus tells the story to suit his interest. Tellus takes more of his psychology and philosophy from you than from him.”
“But I love mankind!”
“Do you indeed? Much of the individualism and unsentimentality of the Swan race was also written into Tellus as he grew to self-awareness, and that competitive streak, the stubbornness, the pride never to yield nor to seek quarter, is more than a little at odds with the maternal instinct you now wish the mother planet had.
“But this is to no point,” the voice of the image continued. “Tellus is a failing system and will soon pass away. The Jupiter Brain shall rule Man, or no one. Man will spread to the nearby stars, or perish on this single world, aborted. Rania shall live, or die.”
Montrose said, “I don’t think I need a long time to think this over. Rania flew to the stars to make mankind free, to prove we were worthy of freedom, to prove we were starfarers. If the only way to do that is to be a race of slaves, what is the point? She did not foresee this, because if she had, she would have stayed home with me, and we would have lived out our lives in peace. After I shot Blackie, of course.” He nodded toward Del Azarchel. “No offense, but you were tyrant of the world, and you would not leave us alone.”
“None taken,” said Del Azarchel magnanimously. “Were the situation reversed, I would have done the same. But … what if she did know?”
“Eh?”
“Every man would like both liberty and life, but what if he can choose only one? For liberty also means the liberty to make war, does it not? For to be free means to be armed, and to be armed means to be dangerous—you know this better than any man. It is in your bones. I choose servility and life, because while there is life, I may yet prevail. You chose liberty, and death, and will not bear any man’s yoke. It is noble sentiment, but it is merely sentimental. But what of her? Which way does Rania choose? She granted peace on Earth, and created the dynamic stability called peace in history, but it was by putting me on the throne of the world. Me. The benevolent tyrant.”
“What the hell are you implying, Blackie?”
“That she thinks as I do. She wants what I want. Did I not raise her from childhood? Spend years with her? Teach her? Know her?”
“You are lying. You know damn well she’d side with me on this!”
“And condemn the race to death?” Blackie asked airily, his expression one of mock surprise. “Oh, come now.”
Montrose turned toward the image of Tellus on the screen. “You are so smart! Tell me Blackie is lying! Tell me which of us is right!”
Tellus said, “He is attempting to lead you to his decision, nor is he telling you the whole truth, but he is correct that you do not understand Her Serene Highness Rania. His only deception is that he does not understand her either, any more than do I.”
“What does that mean?” demanded Montrose.
“You inquired of Selene the riddle of how it was that the first Rania, your Rania, could not read the Monument properly at first, whereas the versions of Monument-reading emulations, both virtual and biological, which I and my more ruthless earlier versions made could not read the Monument as well as she. Specifically, Rania was better able to see the enjambments and subtle structural elements in the Monument message layers, whereas the later emulations could clearly read the surface features, but only those. One would assume the later Raniae grown from more clear instructions would be better interpreters of metalinguistic features, not worse. As it happens, that assumption is false.”
Montrose was curious both to hear the answer, and to hear how this bore on the discussion. He said, “Selene said Tellus might answer that for us. What are you driving at?”
Del Azarchel also looked on with great interest. “No,” he corrected. “She said Tellus must answer. I thought the wording strange. Why must you answer, Tellus?”
Montrose said, “Yeah! Tell us, Tellus!” Then, seeing the look on Del Azarchel’s face, he spread his arms. “So, sue me! Some jokes are too obvious.”
Tellus said, “I must answer, Nobilissimus, because if I do not, Dr. Montrose will have a false idea of the nature of the Monument, and of Rania, and of the cliometric mathematics we learned from them, and how far they can be trusted.”
“What is the nature of the Monument, then?” asked Del Azarchel.
“Rania was not broken or miscreated, as she supposed. The Monument itself is damaged or redacted or edited. Her creation was from an undamaged or unedited segment held over from an earlier stratum of the Monument, a strata not successfully removed. For this reason, she could not read the redacted version of the Monument correctly.”
8. The Broken Monument
That was the last thing Montrose expected to hear. From the look on Del Azarchel’s face, it was the last he expected as well.
Tellus said, “I say again, the Monument at V 886 Centauri is a redaction or a limited copy of some original. There are missing symmetries which should be present, but which were removed. However, the grammar structure of the Monument is recursive and holographic, much like a human brain, so that the whole can be reconstructed from any part. There are traces of the primordial Monument which survived the editing process, traces which were not removed, or which, more likely, could not be removed.
“Our estimate is that the original was composed twelve billion years ago, whereas the redaction was composed quite recently, three hundred fifty-nine million years ago.”
Montrose reflected. Twelve billion years ago was the time when the Population III stars existed. These were unstable ultra-low metallic stars of the early universe that burned in the hot cosmic medium of the aeons when earliest galaxies were being formed. Such stars had been hypothesized, but never seen. All had died out long before the Solar System was formed.
The idea that the message which existed on the Monument had been written at that time was starkly unbelievable. Could life have evolved in a universe where the elements had not yet been created in the stellar furnaces of younger, metallic stars? Rocky planets could not have even been formed. Water could not exist in a universe before the evolution of the oxygen molecule. How could this message in the Monument have been composed then? And by whom?
However the message had been carried, it eventually had been written down, presumably as soon as there was cold and complex matter, elements that could form solids, to write it down into. The physical Monument found at the Diamond Star, that black ball which absorbed all known forms of energy, the mirror-bright lines of writing which reflected all known forms of energy, that ball was from a later era of cosmic history, and it represented a version of the message that had been edited, redacted, marred, meddled with. That had happened during the Carboniferous Period, the Age of the Amphibians. By this scale, that was practically yesterday.