Del Azarchel merely pointed at the blank bulkhead. Realizing Del Azarchel was pointing at something beyond the hull, Montrose switched his goggles to the simulated image of the ship. Through the surface of the imaginary hull, and in the readouts shining on the insides of his goggles, Montrose saw that the stern sail was directed at Earth and the circuits were warm. The through-path monitor in the ship’s spine showed the activity log: an immense amount of data from Earth had downloaded itself by itself into the ship’s circuit, unhindered by defenses and firewalls and physical gaps, and somehow wrote itself into the core of the ship’s brain.

Montrose said, “This ghost did not force his way aboard. You invited him. You broke the deal. I thought you were a bastard but an honest bastard, someone too proud to lie.”

“What lie? I invited him into my half of the ship. He merely trespassed into yours. I suppose you could complain to him, but—thanks to you—he cannot hear you unless you augment yourself.”

Montrose uttered an anatomically unlikely and grotesquely unsanitary imperative.

Del Azarchel replied in a voice of icy calm, “Must I again tell you what must be done? With Rania absent, you and I alone have an instinctive architectural algorithm in our subconscious minds for emulating Monument structures. It is a decryption key. Once we make xypotech emulations of ourselves, a newborn Extrose and a reborn Exarchel, we can copy the key into this ghost and transmit the result back to Earth. That should be effortless, since we know the Monument Builders would have wanted the key to be open to any mind reading the Monument.”

“You have it backward. The Monument Builders did not want the message to be open to the reader. They wanted the reader to be open to the message. And it is not a message but a mesmeric spell. Selene told us. Magic is what mutates you.”

“What?”

“The Monument Builders alter the mind of whoever reads the Monument,” said Montrose. “It is buried in the subconscious because it is a secret message.”

“Secret?” said Del Azarchel. “Absurd! The whole point of a First Contact message is to be as clear as possible to as many alien biopsychologies as possible! The Hyades were announcing their possession of our planet and all of the Local Interstellar Cloud…”

Montrose said, “The Hyades did not build the Monument. Consider how much work Tellus had to do to figure out how to surrender, and how little work I had to do to read their battle plans and invasion date. If Hyades had written it, that would have been reversed.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Hell, Blackie, you read the blueprints for their skyhooks written there. Their fighting machines. Is that the kind of thing anyone shows someone you plan to invade?”

Del Azarchel was speechless. For a mind of his speed, a half-second of silence was like being dumbfounded for half a minute.

Montrose said, “And the Monument was not a First Contact message.”

“How do you know?” Del Azarchel said softly.

“There is no information about the Monument Builders anywhere in the messages or maps or legal equations or anything. No signature. Not the slightest clue. Or maybe one clue: whoever secretly towed the positive matter gas giant Thrymheim into orbit around a negative matter star is a different group from Hyades, or whoever openly placed that star there. The Monument Builders do not want to make contact with us, first or any,” Montrose said with emphasis. “No, Blackie. The Monument was meant for something else.”

On the visual channel, Montrose could see Del Azarchel’s face from his inner mask camera. For perhaps the first time in thousands of years, Del Azarchel was wearing a look of honest curiosity on his face, the look a man gets only when speaking with his equals, hearing some new thoughts about his own area of expertise from another expert.

And perhaps there was a sneaking glint of admiration for Montrose hidden in the expression. He said only: “Meant for what?”

“To send Rania to M3,” said Montrose.

On the visual channel, the expression metamorphosed into Del Azarchel’s wonted look to disdainful calm. He had regained his self-possession; his face once more was a mask. But his voice still betrayed an echo of awed curiosity. “But why? To what end?”

“That is what Rania will tell us when she gets back.”

“If we survive,” said Del Azarchel wryly, once more his cold and smiling self. “Time flies. Shall we get on with it? I have centuries of practice at savantry, whereas you are unnaturally reluctant to make a copy of your brain. Afraid of going mad again, are we? Afraid of being two people? I will be happy to handle the matter myself, without your aid.”

Del Azarchel now flexed his cable to pull him the other way across the vast width of the axis chamber. Montrose called up a transparent overlay. He saw where, at some point in time not reflected on the ship’s growth chart (for its cabins and chambers were continuously being rebuilt and replaced over the decades and centuries), Del Azarchel had installed a savant chamber for brain-to-xypotech uploading. Montrose could not tell if this had been done in the three days since leaving the moon, or years before.

Del Azarchel slid away, light as a fish in the zero gravity, passing one bulkhead after another, heading for the savantry chamber. “You hesitate, even now? The kenosis of Tellus buried in the crystal is even now waiting for us to become visible to him, so we can talk. If all those colonists die, is not Rania’s mission in vain? Are we not proved by events to be too shortsighted, too parochial, too savage, too foolish to be a starfaring race—too damned stupid for the—?”

At that point, the voice line was cut. Montrose looked through pinpoint cameras in the bulkhead and saw that Del Azarchel had pressurized the savantry chamber and taken off his air hood. The chamber was cylindrical, with a surgical cocoon opened wide like a strange white rose made of antiseptic blood-absorption pads on one end, and a cluster of scalpels, bone saws, intravenous feeds like the teeth of a shark ringing the rim of the brain surgery helmet at the other. The Spaniard was smiling, and his breath came in clouds from his white teeth. The atmosphere in the chamber had not had time to warm up to life-support standards, and Del Azarchel might not bother powering up the heating circuits, since temperatures too cold for bacteria to thrive might be more sterile.

But he knew what Del Azarchel had said after the line was off. Too damned stupid for the stars.

That was what this was all about, wasn’t it?

Montrose muttered a set of imprecations involving rotting diseases and reproductive organs as he pulled himself hand over hand to an unoccupied bay, and selected from the design templates to build a savantry chamber of his own. He set the three-dimensional lathes and molecular printer tubs to work. It would take hours to prepare the chamber for brain surgery.

He had time to kill. So Montrose went aft to the Physical Therapy Bay, inflated it, pumped in air and heat and light, doffed his shipsuit, and spent the time tethered to a zero-gee punching bag, driving roundhouses and uppercuts and snap-kicks into the leathery bag, and bouncing like a yo-yo on the end of his elastic tether with each blow. The anger in him slowly subsided as if departing with his concentric clouds of sweat.

4. Stupidity

A.D. 11061

The first thing he remembered after the confusion and delirium had passed was a sense of shame. How could I have been so pestiferous jackassularish stupid?

Dreams had overwhelmed him, image after image. Glowing figures crowned with light bent over a dark well at whose bottom stars were shining; Rania winged like an angel and soaring; swarms of dark, angular creatures picking their way, crablike, across spiderwebs strung between star and star; a screaming queen chained to a sea cliff, and at her feet the jaws of a sea monster running with salt water, the nostrils in its skull blowing steam; his dry-eyed and hard-eyed mother talking to the photograph of his father; a burning house whose sparks spread from garden to wood to field and grassland, until all the world between the sea and sky was a mass of beating inferno, roaring and red, and black ash below and black smoke above conquered all the continents, halted only at the verge of the steaming sea.