Del Azarchel said smoothly, “A medical sedative I had been asked to give you periodically. The event was fortuitous but somewhat unexpected, Learned Montrose. Perhaps something unexpected in your medical…”

“Unexpected? I just happened to go all possessed—or whatever it is called—just at the moment and in the place where it can do you the most good, just when I swallowed something you handed me? Jesus nailed up a tree, Blackie! Was that the only reason you cured me? I thought you were afraid of this Mister Hyde inside of me! Sounds like it is not so much dangerous as hard to get some use out of!”

Narcís D’Aragó said coldly, “Danger? We dread nothing.” Del Azarchel raised a hand an inch or two, and made a small gesture as if to shush D’Aragó, but the soldier raised his voice and spoke out. “No power can arise on Earth to oppose us: We are able to predict the coming of any potential threat to our reign, and destroy whoever refuses to be suborned.”

“And if I don’t agree to be—what was that word? Suborn? You talk like that’s a good thing. What if I don’t play along with your hand?”

D’Aragó did not answer, but looked aside.

“Well, tough guy?” said Montrose, “Are you going to beef me now? Or just ask me to commit suicide?”

There was a mutter of surprise around the great table, two and three voices speaking at once. “He has always been so cooperative before—” “God! I remember him from Camp now—how it comes back—do you remember the time he was drunk and—” “Always getting into fistfights—” “Unexpected. Is there was way to lobotomize just this version, and keep the rest of his brain intact, so the daemon might—”

On second thought, they sounded more indignant than surprised: as if a docile mule had dug in its heels and then talked up out of turn. Being shocked that a mule could talk is one thing. Being shocked that a mule would dare talk back is another.

Father Reyes y Pastor tapped his red metal armband to the tabletop, so it made a ringing, piercing noise like wineglass tapped by a fork: “The Chair will entertain a motion that thread of the discussion be tabled until other matters are settled.”

There was a murmur of agreement. “Call the question!” “Seconded.” “Move acclamation.” “Seconded.” Montrose sank back in his chair, grimacing. Apparently the meeting was informal until someone wanted to silence him, whereupon Robert’s Rules of Order appeared out of nowhere.

Reyes y Pastor—looking like he, not Del Azarchel, was the Chairman here—turned and spoke across the table to Montrose. “We are using a Linear Calculus priority structure to track the conversation topics. A variable will be assigned your question, and you can keep an eye on the time value.”

Father Reyes pointed up at one of the screens, which showed a branching tree, each twig marked with a bookmark of one part of the conversation or another. So someone was keeping minutes after all. Montrose had seen prioritization calculus used in math problems, but never applied to the problem of how to keep the separate topic-threads of a meeting in order.

Montrose said, “Wait. What question? What the hell are we talking about later? Blackie here rogering with me, or do y’all think you are going to talk about me getting killed or lobotomized later? And what, vote on it or something? Bugger that! Whatever those red bracelets pump into your bloodstream must be damn stronger than whiskey, I can tell you.”

No one answered his comment. The conversation had returned to Montrose’s recorded speech. They discussed the clues that Montrose—or Crewman Fifty-One—had uttered, and how each fit into their latest research. But now an image of the Monument appeared in the depth of the library cloth paving the wide central space the table surrounded.

He found the technical conversation so thoroughly sweeping up his interest, that he did not notice his suspicions and his anger being pushed into the back of his mind.

The discussion scrutinized what Montrose had said to the Iron Ghost, the various possible translations of the (apparently impromptu) languages involved. What could be deciphered was compared to the latest research on Monument translation, the findings of all the years Montrose had slept through.

That the Beta Segment was a star-map, for example, had long been known, but not until Montrose and the Iron Ghost had discovered the key to reading it, had it become legible.

Acre upon acre of the information was suddenly opened to the gaze of the Hermeticists. They put the Monument glyphs through various simple algorithms years of research had developed, planes and cubes of visual maps unfolded in the floor underfoot, or along the screens overhead. Files from the mind of the Iron Ghost had been rendered into digital form, and were open to examination. Since the Iron Ghost was Del Azarchel, his memory held the leading edge of human research and theory, and he had applied the tools long developed by the expedition and by Earthly universities to translate the Monument.

“The Encyclopedia Galactica!” breathed Montrose.

More data than one man could comb through in a lifetime was unfolding on their computer screens: stars were listed by mass, luminosity, radius, orbital elements (both for other stellar bodies in multiple star systems, and for the wide, slow courses around the galactic center), metallicity, chemical concentrations, electron-degenerate matter concentrations, stellar evolution characteristics on something remarkably like a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and a set of symbols related to something else. It was the same symbol used elsewhere to refer to intelligence, or intelligence concentration. The stars were apparently rated by I.Q.

But this was the least part of the Beta Segment. Interestingly, the Monument Builders had been less interested in the positions of stars than in the distribution of various rogue planets, interstellar asteroid swarms, and the density of interstellar gasses and particles. Just based on the numbers the map tracked, it seemed as if most multiple star systems lost their planets along hyperbolic orbits during their formation in the stellar nurseries of the great nebular clouds. According to the Beta Segment information, more worlds existed outside solar systems than in, endless numbers of gas giants and failed stars, their great envelopes of heavy atmosphere long ago turned to ice in the dark.

Montrose shivered at the idea of so many sunless worlds. The universe was a strange place after all.

The Eta Segment was game theory mathematics. The Theta Segment was a legal statement, a set of equations dealing with political relationships, defining a field of cooperative and conflictive relations. Symbol theta-six 101 through 202 was one symbol, their concept for domination, or power imbalance.

The next group was a calculus. It was literally the calculus of power. It showed in a few cold equations what happens in a formal game when the weaker player has nothing whatever to offer the stronger player.

The next file from the Iron Ghost showed the application of the cold equations to the values that could be deduced for Earth at its current level of racial intelligence, energy use, and fineness of technical manipulation. It was an equation defining, for any given expected advantages, when contact across interstellar distances was economically feasible and when it was not: in other words, how near another civilization had to be to shoulder the expense and risk of sending a vessel across the intervening distance, given the expected lifespan of the civilization, and other variables.

For the Monument math had analytical methods to reduce all these things to expressions. All the complexity and delicacy of human civilization, all art and romance and inventions: The invisible hand of statistical analysis smoothed out all those variations, all that richness, into a grindingly simple spline expression.