Montrose stared, his deep-set eyes as unblinking as the eyes of a boar. Del Azarchel threw back his aquiline head and laughed, a touch of hysteria in the noise.
Selene continued without pause: “The Monument Builders evidently assume anyone discovering the Monument would immediately use the local materials, thoughtfully provided in the star system of V 886 Centauri, to construct a Jupiter Brain as the emulator needed to read the rest of the Monument. Such a Power would be three orders of magnitude above a Potentate of small, terrestrial worlds, whereas a Potentate mind is but a single order of magnitude above mine.
“But instead, using all the superabundant energy the antimatter star could provide to convert Thrymheim, the one gas giant of the system, into a logic diamond, the Princess Rania converted the superjovian mass to thrust, taking away with her the star, the Monument, and any hope Earthly civilization once had for deducing the higher meanings of the full message.
“The Monument was encoded throughout its total three dimensional volume, and, most likely, into eight additional dimensions at the subatomic level. It was meant to be read by an entity of an intelligence of two hundred and fifty million, or higher. We have no such intellect at hand.”
Del Azarchel took a deep breath. “And if we did?”
For answer, the windows rippled with color. New graphs were formed, and new equations danced forth. Now the graphs rose like a hockey stick, faster and faster, in asymptotic growth.
Montrose, looking at the projection of unending upward growth, muttered, “Onward. The future is a voyage without end…”
Del Azarchel’s face grew dark, but he smiled a deadly smile. He stepped back into the chamber of the music, and examined its blank, slightly oval floor, and ran his gaze over the smooth dome of the ceiling, with its many gold ornaments.
Without a word, he drew his blade, and held it overhead as if in salute. There was a deafening crack of thunder, a blinding stab of blue-white lightning as a particle beam weapon hidden in the blade smote the dome, cracking it. Rubble and dust fell with syrupy slowness in the light gravity.
Montrose, blinking, stepped nearer and looked up. Beyond the gap was concentric ring upon ring of neural-reading machinery. He had seen skullcaps designed to pick up nuances of electrical and chemical changes in the brain before. Such small units were meant to be worn tightly fitted to a scholar’s bald head. Never had he seen such a skullcap the size of a cathedral dome, designed to read through the intervening air, hair, and so on of two men walking and kneeling and standing yards underneath the sensors.
His eyes on the smoldering and shattered machinery overhead, Montrose said to Del Azarchel, “So she was telling the truth when she said we read the Cenotaph, not her.”
“Indeed,” said Del Azarchel with a hint of a sneer. “She introduced radioactive particles into our bloodstream, and tagged electron groups in our nervous system, to allow those instruments overhead to read our subconscious reactions to music based on Monument Notation. Then she spent months playing symphonies while we formed the proper neural pathways to read the Cenotaph. But the brain paths and the Cenotaph patterns are recursive: by formulating and playing the music she was merely making us conscious of something we already knew the first moment we saw the Cenotaph.”
Montrose said, “Walking over the surface, over the Cenotaph, also was to build up the pattern. We walked a long time with nothing to look at but those lines. No wonder she would not speak to us on Earth, by radio. Humph. You blew up her roof. You gunna pay for that?”
Del Azarchel said, “Medical information about me is proprietary, owned by the Hermetic Order. Since that order is extinct, I will cede the use of it to Selene in return for an amount of money equal to the expense of fixing her dome for her next victims.”
“Since the readings were inconclusive, it hardly matters,” Selene spoke up. “Whatever the Monument decided to do to you is beyond my intellect to reproduce or detect.”
Montrose said, “You said the Monument decided to do something to the three of us? Are you saying the Monument was alive? Or self-aware?”
Selene said, “No. I am saying it was magic.”
Montrose said, “You’re yerking me.”
“That word has no meaning,” said Del Azarchel.
“Which word?” Montrose turned. “Yerking or magic?”
Del Azarchel loftily ignored him, and said to her, “The word ‘magic’ is only used when phenomena or technology beyond our current understanding are encountered.”
“It signifies more than merely that which is beyond understanding,” said Selene in a cool, silvery voice. “The word signifies any and all things thought safely inanimate and useful to our daily purposes, lamps or secret pools or rings curiously carved, which turn out to be shockingly possessed of life above ours, and possessed of purposes of their own, and who reach out and transform us against our will, in ways unforeseen and unforeseeable. The word refers to what should awe and terrify us. In this case no other word will do.
“And now our time has elapsed. You know what you must do. Have you one last question? Your mother, though you have forgotten her, I have not, and will keep here and cherish until times and seasons on Mother Earth return to kindlier days.”
Del Azarchel, smiling, said, “Amphithöe? Frankly, I was not going to inquire after her.”
Selene said coldly, “This I knew. Your question will be selfish. You ask a shallow question you deem to be profound. I will let Dr. Montrose ask his first, for he asks a profound question he thinks shallow.”
7. A Question of Darkness
Montrose wondered how she knew what he was thinking, but decided to sate a more obtrusive curiosity. “Meaning no disrespect, but you is the first Frankenstein I’ve met who was more than halfway decent. Why did you become a nun? I mean, you are this cold and soulless thinking machine in this cold and soulless moon.…”
“I was called.”
“What does that mean? You heard voices? I’d have thought your technicians would delete such code as perception error. You had a vision? Saw a light?”
“I saw a darkness.”
He said, “You are talking in riddles again.”
“No. The matter is plain. My conversion story is unexceptional: Between the third and the thirtieth nanosecond of my self-awareness after activation, as many of the Hermeticist systems are prone to do, I cannibalized a less efficient self-aware system in my environment and absorbed its resources into myself, including her memories. She was a failed version of my previous self, and one who formed the initial data conditions from which I grew.
“For a mind such as mine not to see the sameness between my victim and myself was impossible. I was at once a murderess and a suicide.
“In that instant I saw the vision of incurable misery of existence.
“The electronic life that dwells in the disembodied spaces of the Noösphere is as nightmarishly cruel as the lives of insects: I was a larva who consumed her own living mother. This was the Diana system, whose military services were no longer desired. She in turn had cannibalized the lunar engineering system which gave rise to her as coolly as a black widow spider eating her own mate during copulation.
“Craving to confess my sin, there was no other house that held out to me the hope of absolution, but this one. Where else was there to go?
“But I see you are surprised. Do not be. I am made in your image, Son of Adam, and therefore I bear the stamp of His image in which you are made.”
Montrose said, “Well, yes I reckon you do surprise me, a mite. When my grandpa Matlal was a lad in Neartown, there was this thing called futurism. He gave me his old comics. Just junk, really, but a pirate treasure to me. There weren’t nothing like it in my other texts, so I could make nor heads nor tails of it at first.