Montrose felt sick. The endless years he had struggled against the Hermeticists, and against time itself, to produce a race able to resist the aliens—it was all futile.

He looked in Del Azarchel’s eye. The handsome and smiling face was not smiling now. If anything, his eye was even more empty and hollow than Montrose’s. He had spent not only endless years, but endless lives sacrificed as if on the altar of some primitive bloodthirsty idol of stone with goggle eyes and gaping jaws.

But here the idol was of the superiority of the unknown civilization of Hyades. To be enslaved, if it meant to serve as an apprentice and learn the master’s secrets, that, perhaps, a hardhearted man could abide to see done at such a dreadful cost. But to be enslaved for nothing? To be taken not as sheepdogs but as sheep? Merely to be exterminated as vermin?

Del Azarchel said, “The Cenotaph started to say something about the future of these worlds. What is the rest of this message? What is written on the moon?”

“I cannot read the Moon Cenotaph,” said the moon in her silver voice.

Both men looked nonplussed. “Do you jest?” Del Azarchel said, “But this message comes from the Cenotaph.”

“You read it,” she said.

Montrose shouted, “Why do you talk in riddles?”

Selene said, “Riddles contain multilayered information density. You know enough now to make your decision.”

“What are we supposed to decide, pox it?”

“What do you know?” she asked.

Montrose gritted his teeth. “Mother Selene, I know this is all putrefaction and pestiferication. A pack of lies! It cannot be so that you read the Monument segment concerning the Concubine Vector only recently. Rania translated that section of the Monument just in her head on our wedding night, in less than an hour or two. She knew all about the Concubine Vector. That is why she knew the Earth was going to be treated badly by the Hyades Cluster, who say they own us. That is why she took off for M3. So why are you yerking my piss hose?”

Del Azarchel cleared his throat. “Mother Superior, allow me to say, first, that I am not associated with this man of dubious origins standing near me, but also, if you can call down a divine vengeance upon him as would a goddess of old, I am willing to be struck by the flanking discharge of any lightning bolt provided he is hit with the brunt.”

The voice of Selene chimed, “Your words perfectly capture the spirit of unforgiving enmity which exists between you two. I foresee that this spirit, unless tamed, will destroy you both, and in time will therefore slay the Princess Rania, whom you both claim to serve. Yet you have more in common than you admit. Look Earth-ward.”

3. The Graveyard of the Dead Globe

The wall to one side of the chamber parted, revealing a gallery lit with the blinding ground-glare of the naked sun, unhindered by any atmosphere, reflected from the gold and gray pallor of the lunar wasteland.

Here was a triptych of outward-facing windows whose pointed arches were adorned with Borromean rings. The stained glass showed Jonah in a ship, in a storm, in a whale, and huddling beneath a gourd vine, looking out upon the desolate landscape with its too-near horizon. The two men, curious, moved (as lightfootedly as dreams) to the outward-facing windows.

In this building copying the ancient architectural forms, the control gestures were also ancient. Del Azarchel tapped the glass to render the gray of the whale and the blue of the sea transparent, and spread his fingers to amplify the view.

The cardinal directions for Luna were established before astronomers knew the other wandering stars were worlds. Convention decreed that every heavenly body mapped thereafter would have its direction of spin defined as eastward, and which pole was north or south named accordingly, but not the moon. Luna was the only planet or satellite which ever existed or would exist whose dawn was in the west.

At one time, only the sun ever moved in the skies of Luna, rising once a month, and Earth was at a fixed celestial longitude. But now, in what seemed an almost blasphemous abrogation of astronomical history, the moon had been jarred from her constancy, and turned her face, no longer called the near side nor far, the bright side nor dark, toward the Earth.

Hence it was in the west that the Earth was rising above the silent marmoreal plains cut with eccentric curves and angles of alien script as if with a mad network of dry canals.

Closer, a gray and barren boneyard in the lap of a gray and barren valley halfway down the mountain of the basilica swelled large in view as the window focused. The mausoleums were angular patterns of hellishly black shadows and dazzling white marble in the airlessness, and tall statues of angels gleamed an eerie and regal blue in the Earthlight.

Of the hundred headstones, twenty of them bore some variation on the name Rania.

The name variations indicated that one had been constructed from Monument codes crossed with human genetics, another as a she-Locust, another as a Giantess, another as a Witch with special brain segments for intuitions and lucid dreaming, and so on.

Montrose turned toward where the two statues still stood in their niches. “We have some questions, Mother Selene. Like how many Iron Ghost emulations of her did your people kill before they turned to growing biotech versions of Rania to read the Monument for them?”

Del Azarchel said, “Early versions of Rania were no doubt at first much more like the generic Monument-reading emulator the Monument instructs anyone who can read the instructions to build. All the early emulations of Exrania were surely killed. After that, the scientists of this current generation must have been groping to rediscover what I did to create her, and what you did to create the matrix I used.”

The red statue said, “I do not know how many Ghosts, or based on which patterns, lived and died in the Telluric Noösphere. Not knowing which molecular patterns in the nerve cells or blood cells formed the crucial key to Rania’s intuitive understanding, a hundred clones of her were attempted, with the results you see below.”

Montrose said more loudly, “Your intelligence level is somewheres north of ten thousand compared to my four hundred fifty, ma’am! How can you not run the Zurich computer runs I ran? This floor I am standing on consumes more computing power than every computer on Earth back in my day! Combined!”

Del Azarchel said, “I want to know who did this? How they dared to create living variations of Rania and make each one live and die a slave? Do they think the advantage will never be mine again? I permit other beings to excel me in intellect only while I gather resources and plan new strategies. Do they think there will be no vengeance…?”

“Shut up, Blackie,” snapped Montrose. “Her damned husband is the only one who takes vengeance on folks what dishonor the name of Rania by making cheap copies of her—something you did more than once!”

“Not I! I would never commit such a … blasphemy! Sarmento i Illa d’Or bears the blame for that! I never authorized it. But I could not stop him—the code patterns were written in plain sight on the Monument surface, and to transpose the abstractions into human DNA was well within his competence. Besides, he worked with me to create the original Rania, to be our captain, since none but an heir to Grimaldi could open the gene-lock on the ship’s brain. I could not take what Sarmento already knew from his own mind! Not without his noticing eventually! I am not to blame!”

“They don’t have that excuse. Mother Selene! Who did this work? Who made slaves of Rania’s copies and sisters?”

Selene’s voice rang out: “You!”

This was so unexpected that both men stood silent, shocked.