Montrose waited, wondering.

Del Azarchel said solemnly. “Old friend, you and I both put faith the Monument formal symbolism, the logoglyphs and mathematical codes. We thought the Monument Builders had discovered the universal syntax, the absolute langauge, the ratios and expressions that described both matter and energy, time and space, mind and body, and the evolutionary patterns of everything from atom to abstractions. Half by providence and half by design, both of us each in his own way altered his nervous system at a deep level to encode those notation ratios into us. We are partial Monument emulators, just as Rania is. We both put absolute faith in the Monument.”

“What is your point?”

“The cosmos does not match what the Monument describes.”

“Come again?”

“Things are not where they should be if the laws of nature are as they should be and everything were evolving as nature directs. There should be fewer novas, far fewer supernovae. And those supernovae should be found grouped together, as one triggers the next. There should be no pulsars at all, no quasars. There are too many spiral galaxies for natural processes to account for. There should be no Great Attractor in the Virgo Supercluster, none of these long threadlike strands of superclusters, woven of clusters of galaxies, reaching in long bridges across the macrocosmic void. What if…”

As Del Azarchel spoke, he also opened his files for Montrose to inspect. Montrose said nothing, letting the figures and logic symbols dance in their grave waltz through the several layers of his mind.

Come to think of it, had he not himself been noticing the odd violence among the stars? Had he not had a hunch that the star furnaces in Carina or the galactic collisions beyond Alphecca were the handiwork of titans? Montrose was slightly peeved that Blackie had acted on the same hunch and analyzed it mathematically, while Montrose merely gawked and stared.

Montrose interrupted. “What if what? Someone is herding the superclusters to build a bridge? Setting off supernovas like firecrackers? Is that what you are saying?”

Del Azarchel transmitted a laugh of relief. “No. Good heavens, what a concept! I was thinking something more realistic and more terrible. What if the Monument is wrong? The math does not reflect reality? This notation we have built into our brains, and written into the base-level machine language of all our xypotechnology, ghosts and angels and archangels and potentates—it is all false to facts. What if our picture of the universe is radically wrong?”

“How can the math be wrong?”

Del Azarchel said, “How? Use your imagination. Our nervous systems and computer systems do not let us see reality as it is. Our perceptions filter that reality as surely as the phantasm filter you inflicted on Exarchel. It is not reality that forms our logic assumptions, but our evolved mental architecture. We live in a world where it is possible to divide by zero, and pi is a rational number, but our brains cannot accept it, and so we don’t see it.”

Montrose was taken aback. Finally he said, “If the Monument is wrong, maybe it is wrong about everything. Maybe the cliometry is wrong. Maybe Earth is not doomed. Maybe the slave ships will not dump millions of helpless people into freezing and burning hell worlds to die. Maybe the word ‘maybe’ is the mule of a mayfly that mates with a bee.”

“You are talking nonsense.”

“So are you. The Hyades use this math for all their doings. It is good enough for them to maintain an interstellar empire. If the math is wrong, they are insane.”

“Insane enough to devote thousands of years and endless fortunes of energy to slay myriad men in an utterly pointless fashion?”

“Well, like you said, Blackie. This math is built into our brains and minds. If the Hyades are crazy, so are we.”

“And Rania? Is she mad as well?”

Montrose realized that it was purely on faith of something she saw in the Monument, something which, apparently, even Selene could not see, which sent Rania on her quest to M3 in Canes Venatici, beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers had never detected signs of life in that remote globular cluster, no signals of civilization. There was no assurance that there would even be an authority to hear her plea in the remote millennium when she arrived. There was only the word of the Monument.

But all he said aloud was, “Blackie, you leave her name out of it.”

And there the conversation stopped.

3. Intrusion Crystal

In the forward instruments grew the image of the Emancipation. Even with her sails folded, and external cabins deflated, the interstellar vehicle was a sea serpent larger than Leviathan, and the lifting vessel a glass minnow waltzing up to kiss her nose. As if in celebration, the noise of maneuvering jets popped and spat like firecrackers, ringing through the cabin of the lifting vessel. Both men were suited up again, as was the spacer’s tradition during any close approach, and sealed their air hoods.

The popping noise of maneuvering jets shut off suddenly. By a tradition as old as space travel, the vessel with lower mass was supposed to match the velocity and other orbital elements of the larger to save on mutual fuel. But somehow the titanic spire of the Emancipation had her nose within inches of the flyby position, and gave a single short lightning-flash of her titanic altitude jets, so that the two vessels came smoothly together with hardly a jar.

“Something is wrong,” said Montrose. “The mating was too smooth.” But his airhood mike was off, so he did not send the voice signal to Del Azarchel.

Del Azarchel swam into the airlock first. The inner valve opened immediately, as if the nose cabin of the Emancipation was already perfectly matched with the interior conditions of the lifting vessel.

“Wrong,” muttered Montrose to himself. “When did the ship’s brain confirm a nanomachinery match between the two air systems? All these motes and crap humans put in our air, mutations and miscalculations when they misrepair themselves have to be checked.…” He knew there was not enough calculation power aboard the ship for this.

Del Azarchel stopped moving halfway through the rubbery ring of the airlock. Montrose saw a strange red light splashed around the interior, gleaming from the metal clasps of Del Azarchel’s dark shipsuit and bright cape.

The interior of the Emancipation was glistering with a reddish light, the color of an ember that refused to die. Rivulets of diamond like the delta of a river or a fantastic spray of icicles gleamed from the surfaces surrounding any logic ports in the bulkhead.

Both men headed hand-after-hand down the flexible corridor-tubes inward toward the axis of the ship. The tubes thoughtfully expanded to accommodate their bulk, and cilia protruding from the tube walls like many whiskers hurried them along their way.

The drop down the esophagus of the tube was not dizzying after three days in zero gee, despite the lack of a visual horizon. The tube disgorged them into the axis of the shroud house, the longest of several long bays that extended fore and aft beyond sight. The logic diamond at the core of the ship had expanded, sending out odd growths in fractal patterns like sea coral or the limbs of barnacle-crusted kragens. Heat and light shed from the diamond core indicated furious activity in the ship’s brain. This was the source of the sullen red light.

Montrose sent a directed microwave pulse to Del Azarchel: “Did you do this? We had a deal! We agreed to keep the ship’s brain as a ratiotech, limited intelligence. Not awake. It was when you were sending all that data to the astronomy house, wasn’t it? You sent a signal to trigger a by-his-bootstraps uplift of the ship’s brain from ratiotech to xypotechnic self-awareness. The ship grew smart enough that she was no longer a phantasm to the Tellus Mind.”