“I don’t remember deciding to come up here,” said Montrose.
“Eh?”
Montrose said, “That is why I am mad. Because I do not recollect ever deciding to fly up into low orbit; nor do I recollect deciding to visit this orbiting iceberg that was not here when I went to sleep. I woke up, spent quite a while deciding what body to put on, turned into a Patrician, and came out of a little set of pods growing on vines in one of the buried cities. Then I took a high-speed pressurized tube up through the crust to the bed of the layered oceans of liquid atmosphere, looked up with my magic new eyeballs, and came straight here to this little snowball of a moonlet. Which turns out to be made of logic diamond. And here was Torment in her remote-control puppet body waiting. See? She did something to my mind to make me come here without me realizing it.”
Torment said, “Not I. It was done with far more fineness and nicety than I could ever manage. And, in any case, I still hold myself to be obligated not to meddle with human affairs, since, in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of my own conscience, I am still bound by the ruling made by Triumvirate, at least for now. Once I wed Ain and become one of his harem of worlds, his laws will govern me. But look!” She raised a slender, pale finger and pointed. “Your dark shadow and spiritual twin approaches. He is more cautious than you, or perhaps more self-aware, and more quickly realized the extent and depth of the manipulation that enchants and summons him. He pauses, he hesitates, he deliberates! His curiosity wars with his pride. Perhaps he will fall in wrath back to the surface, willing to forgo this high consultation that he might later boast he was not summoned by a glamour so easily as you.”
It seemed curiosity was a greater force in him after all, for just then, like a vast black bat, came Del Azarchel winging low over the close horizon. His gold Patrician-style body was strikingly handsome against the coal-black mantle he had donned. With a seemingly effortless mastery of the delicate balancing of propulsive and attractive fields, he came to a perfect halt half an inch from the surface and merely lowered his sandal toes to the surface.
Unlike Menelaus, he did not fumble when establishing a field to carry his communication signals. “You called, madam? I would have come at a gentler invitation. Know that I am offended by your casual presumption on the sovereign integrity of my mind. My vengeance—”
She said, “Your vengeance means exactly nothing. Once you and your bright shadow and spiritual twin are vanished from this domination and realm, taking your paired monomania with you, all my calculations will be returned to normal levels, and the freakish unknowns you continue unknowingly to intrude into history with vanish with you.”
Montrose said, “’Lo, Blackie. Happened to you, too, huh?”
He spread his hands. “It was so subtly done that even now I am not certain. Perhaps it is but airy whim and a coincidence that I am come! And yet here I find you and my oldest servant—now, ironically, serving the Church which is the only human institution older than I.”
“Not human,” said Mickey.
Montrose said, “Creepy, ain’t it? Something called us here. I don’t find no broken memory chains, no record of a break in any damn firewall, no nothing. That means…” He paused, frowning. “That means the suggestion was put into my head through something in the environment.”
Del Azarchel said, “Such as what? Tiny clues carefully calculated to play off buried memories? Or the smallest possible neural energy pressures adding and subtracting the tiniest bit from memory flows or associational chains without breaking them?”
Mickey said, “I have noticed in myself that often some smallest thing, which spine of which book my eye first falls on when I enter a library, or the pattern of omens seen in birds, will remind me of some memory or another, and provoke one thought or another. Anyone able to know beforehand how each stray thought of mine might fall out for each stimulus could arrange books or birds or whatever else was needed—a burp of indigestion, an invisible bump in the road—to provoke my thoughts into the predicted path and do all this without once manipulating the actual brain substance itself.”
Montrose said, “No one knows me that well, not even me.”
Del Azarchel said, “If some higher supremacy has solved the fundamental problem of chaos mathematics, so that the unexpected results of complex problems could indeed be anticipated with this degree of precision—”
Torment said, “Gentlemen, what you are describing is not a new branch of mathematics but a new way of envisioning reality in its cosmic unity. Such an ability is incomprehensible. How would it circumvent Heisenberg limits on certainty of particle position and mass? How would it avoid categorical paradoxes of determinism and volition?”
Mickey said, “Then how do you account for the Judge of Ages and the Master of the Empyrean being led here, each against his will, neither with his knowledge?”
Torment said, “I do not account for it. Where there are no data, there can be no theory.”
Mickey said, “You called me, great goddess. How is this not your doing?”
Torment said, “I am only a Potentate. I possess no such ability. I constructed this remote body in this location once I understood it to be the destination of the summons calling these two men here. Your bodies are slow and gross, whereas I am swift and subtle, so I was here hours in advance. However, I can provoke no reaction from the emissary. It wants to talk to you.”
The three men stood (or, rather, hovered with their boots or sandals anchored) in silence a moment, each wrestling with the impossible and obvious conclusion that Ain had called them here.
Montrose said slowly, “You know, come to think of it, I do not remember why I decided to download my brain into a Patrician body…” And he turned certain specialized sense organs in his nervous system toward the core of the moonlet.
His senses were suddenly jarred into activity, as were the pattern-recognition system, linguistic and chemical, in his multitiered nervous system. It was like staring into a suddenly unhooded lantern.
4. Communication Splendor
With his Patrician senses, Menelaus Montrose could see that the random Brownian motions of the molecules in the logic diamond at his feet no longer seemed random. From dozens, if not hundreds, of point sources studded along the trunks of the thirty-foot-tall dendrite before him, energy packages, mostly of neutrino and neutrons locked in artificially stabilized isotopic structures, like freakish atoms lacking both electrons and protons, were playing back and forth between the other three dendrites below the close horizon, but visible through the transparent crust and core of the moonlet.
It was a vast and intricate dance of three-dimensional geometries forming patterns within patterns.
He recognized the patterns instantly. The False Rania had brought back a complete translation and thorough analysis of the eleven-dimensional Monument notation syntax. Present in his environment on a molecular scale, extending for miles through the silent diameter of the electromagnetically neutral vacuole, were four of the eleven communication dimensions arranged in notation. Every crooked or circular motion of the neutron dance traced out yet another set of patterns within patterns, cycles within epicycles.
It was like stepping into a cathedral carved by generations of obsessive madmen, who had covered each stained-glass window with images and symbols trembling with layers of meaning, wrote anagrams on each floor tile and shaped each letter of each riddle into the forms of fabulous many-headed animals, each with its own heraldic meaning, and also erected pillars, arches, fonts, and statues in the poses and postures of the dance who marble hands and white fingers all pointed toward some central sanctum sanctorum of meaning, paradoxically simple, impossibly profound.
It was a work of art, a poetry of balanced signs and signifiers, beyond his capacity to comprehend, greater than any artwork of man or Potentate or Power, yet set here, for him, dashed off as quickly and simply as a picture postcard.