“That is a monument to Baker’s Dozen, the thirteenth and last in a series of Great Apes at Oxford, who learned to speak using the somatic pattern method. She was only about as intelligent as a three-year-old—a dull three-year-old at that—and spent her last days in a quarantine hospital, playing with toys and trying not complain or cry. They did not have the heart, the two scientists who raised her, to tell her she was dying.”
“Cassimere and Morrow. We studied their work extensively, since they are the only people ever (’sides us, natch!) to try to map human symbols to a nonhuman mind.”
“She was the last of her species. Dozen the Ape died of the Juedenvirus the very same day I was born. She has always haunted me. Had it not been for the war—who knows? Man might not be alone. What might your drug have done for them? There could have been a second human race, younger brothers, to work alongside us.”
The bronze face was frozen in a look of almost human suffering, tragic, dignified, silent, futile. “Quite an imagination, whoever made this. Almost looks sad.”
“The sculptor worked from photographic models. That face, that poor subhuman face, wears the expression of those who, unlike you, meet fate, and cannot master it.”
“Why this statue next to your horse boneyard?”
“For contrast. Ah! I keep her here, my iron ape, to remind me how life works.”
“Oh? And how is that?”
“Life cares nothing for justice. The Great Apes were a more evolved form of life, more intelligent, more adaptable, more like us. Stupid beasts, horses, easily spooked, and without enough sense to come in out of a cold rain. Yet why are they alive, whereas the apes died?”
“The Jihad Plague was easier to cure in horses than in apes.” Menelaus shrugged. “Or ’swhat I heard, anyway.”
“No. The answer was that the stupider creatures were more valuable to men, their masters, and we spent more time, effort, energy, and attention to save them. It was in our self-interest, since, during those years, everyone in South America and Africa was turning from petrol-based back to horse-based transport. The horse was more useful.”
4. Brachistochrone Curve
By that point they had left the garden behind. When Menelaus realized they were headed toward one of those buried vacuum-pipeline magnetic-levitation train stations Del Azarchel had boasted of, he expected to see some stainless-steel platform, zooming cars shaped like pneumatic cylinders, or to hear the humming of vast solenoids.
Instead, they merely entered a chamber that looked, at first glance, like any other, windowless, but adorned with the flowers and ferns spacemen have always loved. Here were shelves of old-fashioned leather-bound books, and there was a chessboard. Perhaps it was a library. Then he noticed that all the chairs in the room were padded and could swivel to face the same direction. He glanced back at the door: or rather, doors. He had been fooled because they folded into the walls, but he could see the inner threshold did not quite touch the outer. This chamber was nested inside some sort of shell, and presumably the long axis of the chamber pointed in the direction of motion. Library? A private depthtrain car, with material to read during longer trips.
He seated himself in one of the comfortable chairs while a wine steward passed out wine. A young food taster in a blue skirt and white apron sipped it before passing it to him, and Menelaus scowled at the girl, wondering if she’d brushed her teeth. A medical readout on her apron monitored blood chemistry and nerve conditions. “Couldn’t you get a guinea pig or a chemistry set to take your job?”
He was sorry he said anything, because, during the moment while he spoke, and before Menelaus could raise the drink to his lips, the sawbones, that Oriental doctor in white, had snatched the drink out of his reach, and gave him a cold and unsmiling nod.
Menelaus leaned forward. “Blackie, can you send these guys out?”
Del Azarchel made the slightest of nods, and the crowd of the entourage, without any further words, made their elaborate bows and backed out or marched out of the chamber.
Montrose snatched the wineglass back out of the doctor’s hand as the man was bowing out. He favored the other with a wink and a grin as the doors slid shut between them. Then he tossed down the drink without tasting it: a waste of fine wine, to be sure, but he needed the fortitude.
Del Azarchel was smiling his dazzling smile, and had one eyebrow raised, as if on the edge of asking a question.
Montrose spoke first. “What happened to Grimaldi?”
Del Azarchel’s face fell. “Ah. Prince Ranier suffered terribly from the confinement, the loneliness of space, and the frustration, the maddening, eternal puzzle of the Monument. The sense that there were infinite secrets just beyond his grasp, written in a code the human brain was not well formed enough to understand—the sheer frustration was like a miserly debtor, and exacted its levy with interest.”
“You saying he went nuts? Pestilence! I don’t believe you. He was more stable than you. Or me.”
Del Azarchel said, “I am not a psychiatrist: I only know the strain and pressure were terrible. His judgment was affected. Captain Grimaldi came to increasingly strange and outlandish conclusions about the Diamond Star, and the Monument, and what the signs and symbols meant. He was trying to see the patterns in it, you see, all the crooked alien hieroglyphs, all the rippling, eye-confounding cursives. Who knows what he saw? When the Conclave judged him unfit for command, he refused to step down. We were not a military expedition. Didn’t we have the right to vote on it?”
“Actually, no. If I recall the governing Articles aright, the Conclave can’t do more than advise him to step down. It cannot force him. Only the ship’s doctor, for medical grounds, had the right.”
Del Azarchel waved his hand as if to brush away Montrose’s comment like so much smoke. “These events, to me, are long past, and I am not a lawyer. You will forgive me if I skip certain details. Even after so many years, the memory is nightmarish to me. I am not proud of what happened.”
Montrose was aghast. “Not proud! I ’spect not! You were supposed to obey the Captain, even if he ordered you to die.”
Del Azarchel spoke softly, reluctantly. “He did.”
“He did what?”
“He ordered our deaths.”
“Pox on that! Not Grimaldi, he was not like that kind of man!”
“Years and decades fled while you slumbered. You know nothing of what he was like.”
“I know Grimaldi was the finest officer alive.”
“So I knew as well, for so he was—when you knew him. Those days were past. I told you, he was under pressure. It affected his judgment.”
“Insane? The ship’s doctor could have made a ruling.”
“Dr. Yajnavalkya was a malnutrition victim. During the hunger watches. The quarter-rations could not sustain him, not at his age. I do not say the Captain went mad. But he did order us to halt the star lifting.”
“What? But that means—”
He saw from the look in Del Azarchel’s eyes that there was no need to finish the sentence. They both knew the facts.
There was no return trip without the antimatter to use as fuel. The whole expedition plan turned on the idea that the robotic mining ship Croesus could power a braking laser to stop the incoming Hermetic, and power up that laser to accelerate her to interstellar velocities again.
Space near the Diamond Star had been swept clear of normal matter, of course. There was one superjovian in a far orbit, farther from V 886 Centauri than Pluto was from Sol, a terrene-matter body called Thrymheim. That was all. There was nothing else in the system. No uranium-bearing asteroids. Nothing for the Croesus to use as a power source for the launching laser to propel the Hermetic on her silvery sails back across the widest abyss—over a light-century—mankind had ever crossed.