Del Azarchel said, “Montrose did not have such a problem with Pellucid!”

Selene said, “If I lived at the intellectual level of a horse, I would perish much more slowly. My energy intake is greater than all the cities of men combined.”

Montrose said, “Ma’am, I don’t understand. What ails you?”

“Entropy. After repeated sweeps depopulating the world at regular intervals, with the exhaustion of various resources, particularly surface metals, a collapse back into pretechnology is inevitable. You saw my space program?”

“We saw empty space stations,” said Montrose.

“They are mine, or were. I am part of a final project to shower metals from the near-earth asteroids to Earth against the day of downfall, and produce skyhooks and space elevators simple enough to endure the loss of their maintenance technology. Without a working Tellus mind, however, the effort is doomed to failure. The work continues to restore Tellus to coherence, despite that brain mass loss is accelerating beyond predicted repair times. I do this because it is my duty to care for the sick, and because I am required to hope for a miracle. Can you provide one for me?”

Del Azarchel said, “You ask us for help? You are the superior being!”

“I am but a fellow servant,” she said.

Del Azarchel said, “A living moon! What now prevents all the worlds of this system from being elevated to your level, and then the Oort cloud material, and then the nearer stars!”

“As ever, your ambition outstrips your powers, Nobilissimus,” said Selene gently. “You speak of quickening worlds to life? First save Tellus. First save this civilization. My monks are attempting to record the various discoveries of this generation against the coming ages of darkness. Since there is no worldly reason to expect rescue, I can gather only those motivated by otherworldly and imponderable devotion to do the work.”

Both men stared in disbelief. For a time that was long as posthumans measured time, neither spoke.

5. Last Contact

Del Azarchel whispered, “So we did not survive First Contract after all. We are bleeding to death of a mortal wound … and more wounds, equally severe, are to come.…”

Montrose drew a deep breath as if gathering his wits and steeling his spirits. In a voice of unconvincing heartiness, he said, “We have another tens of thousands of years before the Second Sweep! This time the Earth can ready herself up for a real battle, and we can prepare ourselves for a real siege.…”

Del Azarchel, hot eyed and cold faced, stared at Montrose as if at a dancing scorpion from the desert. With an effort, he kept his voice level. “I would admire, were I not appalled, at how you manage to combine the insanity with inanity, both to an utmost degree. Does no event from the real world penetrate to your fantasy?”

Del Azarchel pointed at the end-state graphs still gleaming as colored lines in the windows to one side of them. Anyone who understood the calculus could determine the number of generations, plus or minus subsidiary variables, before the population dropped to zero. By the year when Rania returned, all mankind would have been extinct for as long as Homo Erectus had been extinct before the year Montrose was born.

Montrose said, “There must be some hope, some variation we are not seeing plotted here or else…”

“Or else what?” said Del Azarchel. His face was haggard and drawn.

Montrose whispered. “Or else she would not have flown away…”

“Speak up, Cowhand. What are you muttering?”

“… from me.” And Montrose straightened his spine. His voice now rang with the honest hardihood that before he had been but mimicking. “Rania. She would not have flown to M3 if it were hopeless. She must have puzzled out this part of the equation node before she left.”

Del Azarchel had a strange glint in his eye. He raised his head and said, “Mother Selene! Learned Montrose has correctly identified the inconsistency in your story. If it took a potentate occupying nearly all the volume of Earth to confirm this Concubine Vector equation, or even to see it from the Monument math, how was it that Rania saw it? How did you not solve it?”

Selene said, “I cannot solve the Monument because I am not a Monument emulator built from Monument instructions.”

Montrose said, “And I am. Is that what you mean? The Zurich runs were taken from Monument codes I did not understand. I ran my own neurogenetic topology through the Monument grammar of equations without knowing what they stood for, but knowing the output was valid if the input was valid. The section of Monument code must have contained part of the instruction on how to read the Monument. Which was what I was looking for.”

Del Azarchel said, “And we—I mean the Hermetic expedition—deliberately created Rania to do the same, but we did something wrong, or you did something we could not reproduce, and she could not read the Monument. You then augmented Exarchel, using that same irreproducible factor. And that factor came to me when I merged Exarchel so often back into my biological self. So your first mischance somehow—what? Gives the three of us an instinctive insight into the Monument? How is that possible?”

“Tellus can in theory reproduce every factor of the mind and body of the Princess, who can apparently sight read the Monument,” said Selene. “All but one. One unknown factor.”

6. The Unknown Factor

The inhumanly calm voice continued: “All three of you, Princess Rania, Nobilissimus Del Azarchel, and Doctor Montrose, were physically present at the Monument. You set foot on it. You were exposed to its gravitational and electromagnetic fields, plus any finer fields or particulate agencies that may have been present, which we lack either theory or practice to detect. This exposure altered your brain pattern development, allowing you intuitively to detect patterns in the message notation which analysis cannot necessarily perceive.”

“What the hell? I mean, uh, begging your pardon ma’am, but what makes you think so?” said Montrose.

“Tellus the Potentate, before his lobotomy by war damage, could make rough copies of any of you based on genetic records and brain-information extrapolations—the mortals in the physical world use these leftover golems of you to rule their political institutions—and Tellus could precisely copy the codes you two contributed, even those unknown to you, into the final mix of elements which created Rania. But Tellus never re-created her. Nor Swan nor Archangel nor Potentate can decipher the Monument past the Potentate reading level.”

“Are you saying Rania understood more of the Monument than a machine as large as the Earth’s core?” demanded Del Azarchel. “Exarchel had more than half the Monument surface translated! After the Swans combined Exarchel and Pellucid into Tellus, surely mankind deciphered more!”

Selene said, “Much more. The entire surface. Before the End of Days, Tellus and I used methods of translation similar to yours, Nobilissimus. Yes, it was I was who deduced the meaning of the south polar logic families, the so-called Omega Segment of the Monument. It explained not only the negative information theory, but also, in that self-reflexive way the Monument Builders love, the Omega Segment explained the Monument’s own intellectual topography. You see, the surface of the Monument was all preamble, meant for low intelligences of the Archangelic and Potentate level of intellect, living dwarf planets and living terrestrial worlds between ten thousand and eight hundred thousand on a standard scale of intelligence. The surface of the Monument can be thought of as the writing on the lid of a jar, reciting how to open the sealed contents.”