“Those from whom you beg alms, on whose imperfect grace you henceforth rely.”

“Can you translate that from fancy to Meany?”

The voice said, “Nobilissimus Del Azarchel must pardon you, and you him, if only for imagined wrongs.”

“Pox! I ask no adds of him! I’d rather roger him with a red-hot corkscrew.”

“Too, the human race entire must forgive you for what you are about to do; and Noösphere called Tellus, or what remnant yet remains, for what in ages past you did.”

The red statue, at the same time (for all present could follow two or several conversations at once) had raised its balance scales, and was saying to Del Azarchel, “Love surpasses all barriers and bounds, for it is the fundamental substance of the universe. But I cannot abridge the legal and psychological requirements of the phantasm imperative. Dr. Montrose installed specific structures of behavior into all basic machine-language codes used by the entire Tellurian Noösphere, which we, and all subsidiaries, are wise to honor. Until you are above the Third Comprehension, you will not comprehend.”

“One more thing to add to his account when the reckoning comes,” said Del Azarchel, looking sourly at Montrose.

“The reckoning has come and gone,” said both the black statue and the red, in unison.

And the floor as black as outer space lit up with a glittering dazzle of silvery lines, as if drawn in an ink made of mirrors, of the angles and spirals of the Monument notation.

2. The Concubine Vector

In the years since the rise of the Swans, thousands and tens of thousands of minds operating at the posthuman level had worked on translating the Monument, not just Montrose, Rania, and a half-dozen Hermeticists. New methods of translating the hieroglyphs had been perfected, which opened up additional layers of meaning, and made connections between disconnected segments of the Monument, in much the same way that a poem broken across lines has a different meaning than when read linearly.

This “enjambment” was difficult to read. Even all the resources of the Tellus Mind at the core of the Earth, for hundreds of years, could not perform the exegesis. One enjambed segment in particular defied analysis, where the Cold Equations describing the logic of the interstellar polity dealt with the special equations of quid pro quo that obtains when no mutual benefit is possible.

In each possible social and political system, there were certain circumstances where injustice was tolerable, or, at least, where the cost of detecting and deterring the injustice was prohibitive.

Both men knew examples. In the Spain of Del Azarchel’s past, when he and his gang were shoplifters, he knew shops expected a certain amount of theft from walk-in customers because the economic loss from only inviting in trusted customers was too high. For specialty shops dealing in jewelry and the like, the risk-reward ratio differed. In each different case, Del Azarchel’s gang was careful to steal just under the amount it would cost to build more heavily augmented guard-baboons or train the store alarms to more discriminating intelligence.

In the long vanished United States, which the Texans of Montrose’s youth still in legend recalled, the laws made the conviction of criminals difficult, because his people held it wiser to let nine guilty men go free, than to condemn the tenth man who was innocent. In each case where Montrose was defending the guilty, his firm tried to produce enough doubt in the minds of the jurors, or enough nostalgia for the lax laws of gentler days, to make sure their client was one of those ten freed men, guilty or no.

And so in all general cases where a marriage of interests cannot be found, there are times when the weaker party finds it economical to yield to the stronger.

The voice of Selene, cool and dispassionate, drew their attention to recursive parallels hidden in the enjambment. She spoke (or squawked) in the high-density language of the Savants, which was notable for the precision of its expression. “This part of the Cold Equations that govern interstellar polities is the one your Rania called the Concubine Vector. It is so shameful a vector that the Monument builders did not explicitly draw it out. Rania discovered it by augmentation of that section of her brain that deals with music. The musical instinct in the brain intuitively follows patterns and symmetries that exist in mathematical ratios. Hence, the musical consciousness can at times deduce truths the rational consciousness cannot.

“In the last years before the arrival of the Asmodel mass, the entire logic diamond at the Earth’s core examined the Monument through musical notation, attempting painstakingly, by sheer brute and unlovely number-crunching, to work through possible variations and deduce the enjambed and hidden vector of the Monument: to deduce statistically what a musician could intuit instantly.

“It was only by deducing the Concubine Vector that we, the human race, who are far lower on the ratio of power imbalance with interstellar life than the Monument measures, could foretell what Asmodel’s instructions and strategies would be.”

“How was it possible at all? Surely in wartime, no being acts predictably,” said Del Azarchel. “Would not Asmodel use the same equations to deduce what you would deduce, and do the opposite?”

“Were we of equal stature, perhaps so,” the silvery voice continued. “But, first, contemplate that the Hyades must instruct their machines and their agents to operate by precisely predictable mathematical patterns controlled by these Cold Equations, or else they cannot foresee nor foreordain their own obligations across interstellar distances and time-gulfs. Second, contemplate that the slope of the power imbalance was vertical. This was not a war, no more than is the struggle between fishermen and fish.”

Montrose said, “And what did you deduce?”

She played for them the theme and counterpoint from two different parts of the Monument.

Montrose and Del Azarchel listened to the Concubine Vector, frowning or smiling as the implications became clear to them.

Perhaps a long time after, or perhaps a short (posthuman time sense was flexible), Selene spoke again. “We deduced how to save ourselves. At the eleventh hour we adjusted our strategy of resistance to accord to the Concubine Vector parameters.”

“To make the resistance more effective?” asked Montrose.

“Not as such. During the war, Asmodel placed fourteen distortion engines in the photosphere of Sol, which can still be seen as permanent sunspots of immense diameter. The sunspots are the anchor points of monomagnetic flux tubes capable of focusing a measurable fraction of the solar output into lased emissions of interstellar range. Where the mechanism is that produces these effects, or of what substance it is composed, if any, is unknown and undetectable. Tellus interfered with the interstellar flux tubes using mechanisms in sub-Mercurial orbital and attracted one of them toward Earth.”

“I don’t understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his harsh tone of voice showed that he did.

“Displaying the ability to move the Earth as a dirigible planet without destroying the surface was an engineering feat that demonstrated that we had achieved the minimum level of sentience.”

Del Azarchel grimaced at this, but adjusted his brain chemistry so that his expression grew placid the moment he noticed Montrose squinting sidelong at him, suppressing a smirk.

The smirk died of its own accord when Selene added, “Altering the Telluric orbit also used the remaining available energy resources Tellus could command. It was the same as exposing our throat. It was a surrender gesture.”

Del Azarchel said, “Since to impress the Hyades with our worthiness to be their slaves was a prime part of my scheme to allow mankind to survive First Contact, while I am disappointed we so nearly did not meet their standards, nonetheless, I am grateful for the sake of our survival we did. They accepted the surrender?”