Montrose realized he had not said “Señor,” the Spanish honorific—but “Senior,” the name of the Expedition member in charge of coordinating extra-vehicular teams: the chief of the landing party.

Montrose looked toward the window, and saw the snowy peaks and clefts rearing above ruins. Night was falling, and soft yellow lights now dotted the sheer walls of the far craters. Other lights gleamed on glass-roofed gardens like emeralds or glanced dancing through waterfalls like threads, the polished silver dashing into the crater depths, making them shimmer with rainbows in the gathering gloom. He wondered if that was another set of mansions, or part of this one.

The spread was bigger than most towns he’d been in.

“How much is yours?”

“All of it.”

“What, the castle, the crater, the mountain range?”

“Everything on the globe. Everything under the sky. I am the Imperator Mundi, the Master of the World.”

He smiled and there was a glitter in his eye.

“I am master not just of Earth, but of the destiny of Earth. Not just these lands surrounding, but the years and centuries to come, I can shape. We will share the glories of royalty and the luxuries of wealth, you with me. Let us command the future to be a golden one, and to bring forth everything we have dreamed!”

6

Intellect Emulation Mechanism

1. A Golden Future

“So. You’re Master of the World. Sounds mighty nice. But … Only one?”

Del Azarchel blinked. “How many do you prefer?”

“How many can I get? What do we have by way of colonies on the Moon yet?”

“Nothing.”

“Damnation and pustules! Sounds like you’re marching slipshod. Colonized Mars?”

“It’s colder than Antarctica, the oxygen is locked into surface rust, and the microatmosphere is only thick enough to carry hypersonic sandstorms able to disintegrate the metal hull of any lander unfortunate enough to survive hard-down. So, no, I am not the Lord of Mars or the Moon.”

“No Mars bases! Prickly hat of Jesus! What kind of crappy future is this?”

Del Azarchel smiled an urbane smile. “One that avoided global holocaust, despite the weapons of absolute war in our arsenals.”

Montrose plopped himself down on the bed, slouching, his eyes glittering with a weird mix of disappointment, puzzlement, and wonder. “You see,” he said finally, “I dreamed about Mars when I was young. That was one of the things I dreamed about. Also, I wanted a car that flew. Rocketpack. Raygun.”

“What have we not dreamt, we dreamers? We dreamt of power, energy in abundance to accommodate our dreams; we dreamt of expanded consciousness, intelligence augmentation, nerve regeneration, organ rejuvenation, and artificial life, extended life, intensified life! We dreamt of minds created according to design, techniques to cure insanity and sin, sciences to create new forms of life, beasts and birds to be our serfs and playthings and companions, and then to work the great work of creation! To make the Man beyond Man, the next step of evolution, as far above us as we above the ape. And even this would be merely the first step in the cosmic dance!”

Montrose gave him a hard look. “You ain’t translated the Monument yet, have you?”

“Not so! We translated the whole of the Alpha Segment.”

“That all?” The Alpha Segment was less than one percent of the surface area. “It’s been, what, a century? Almost two? I was thinking maybe y’all got up through the Beta, Gamma, and Delta segments, and maybe part of Eta?”

Del Azarchel looked surprised. “How the devil did you—that is a good guess. Really good. We have made major inroads into just those segments, and nowhere else.”

“Don’t look so impressed. This room: I don’t see any force fields in the lamp or tractor-presser beams shooting out the sink or anything other gee-whiz-wow-wonder gizmos that I should see, if Earth science had a working unified field theory. Pictures here on the walls show wars on Earth and wars in space, but I don’t see anything that looks like a fundamentally new weapon system—the kind of new that comes from a new model of the universe. The Beta Segment of Monument symbols we knew were a particle menagerie and periodical table, and Gamma Segment was pretty sure to be the linguistic calculus, and I know that part contained the key to translating the higher sections. Eta Segment—you all mocked me when I said it, but Eta looked to me like game theory, perhaps an introduction into something more basic, like a really rigorous mathematical analysis of economics and politics. If you actually have the Earth under one rule these days, you must know a damn sight more about political economy than anyone of my generation. But you don’t seem to have more physics. So—No great guess involved.”

He shrugged, then continued: “The Monument Builders were trying to tell us all the secrets of the universe just because science is the universal language. No way else you prove to a stranger from a strange world you are intelligent, I reckon—But we didn’t get all the secrets they wrote down: ’cause, where are your flying cars, Blackie? If you had translated the Monument, a good big chunk of it, I mean, surely we’d have working antigravity by now, and a castle floating in the clouds, up on high, just where God and storybook illustrators always meant castles to be.”

“Well, parts of the Monument have been translated,” said Del Azarchel, “including enough of a not-quite Unified Field Theorem from the Beta Segment to know that antigravity cannot operate in a universe as curved as ours is curved, not over anything less than intergalactic distances and aeons of time. And as you deduced, the symbols contained in Gamma Segment include a system for quantifying concepts into a grammar of formal signs: a complete set, and self-defining. It was the very thing Goedel long ago proved could not be done—or thought he did.”

“That’s all?”

“All?” Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “It was so revolutionary that radio messages from Earth accused us of fraud! No expert believed it! This notation is the Philosophical Language, a universal grammar, that Leibniz and others so long ago for so long sought. In theory, any language system, any method of encoding meaning, speech, or writing, or flashes of a heliograph, any method, including human brainwaves or genetically determined behaviors, can be translated into any other! In theory, a complex enough expression could encompass all the variables of human society.”

“But the Monument did not contain an instruction book on how to build a faster-than-light drive?”

Del Azarchel looked impatient. “Oh, yes, we have all that. But it requires a blue fairy riding the back of a unicorn on the thirty-first day of February to make it work.”

“Oh, Goedel is wrong, but Einstein is gospel! And you’re poking fun of me for that. What about the aliens? Did the Monument give us a map, tell us where they hail from? Any contact with them yet? We sell them Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars or anything? Can I see one?”

“If you live long enough.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The Monument provided us a clue. Astronomers studying the open cluster in Hyades, a mere one hundred fifty lightyears away, hypothesize that the high helium-carbon content of those stars is due to large-scale engineering, not to natural effects. Macroscale engineering. There may be an intelligence of some description within hailing distance. Well, that is to say, the descendants ten generations after the present generation would hear the response to a hail we send out.”

“Three hundred years between call and reply, huh?”

“Plus turnaround time, yes. Time to make the decision to respond, gather the money, gather the will.”