“Hey! What’s—what’s wrong? Supermen don’t cry!” He held her one-handed, the bookpad in the other. The light from the pad screen fell across her buttocks and legs.

“Tears of joy, of joy unknown to lesser men, they do,” she said, sniffing and hiccupping as she laughed. “I know who I am! At long last!”

“Uh. Okay. Hit me. Who are you?”

“The redeemer. I will vindicate the human race.”

“Uh. Okay. What the hell does that mean?”

Rania wiped her nose on her elbow and spoke to the pad. “Twinklewink! Bring up file code last.” The floating fairy on the screen overlaid the Monument lines with a second and third layer of hieroglyphs.

To him she said, “You have read as far as the Iota and Kappa segments, which gives their equations of political calculus. What you call the Cold Equations.”

He nodded. “Basically, the stars are so far apart it ain’t worth no one’s time and effort to cross the abyss, unless they have a planet to conquer and loot on the other side.”

“That applies only when the power imbalance is vertical. In general game theory, a situation of mutual benefit and expected mutual benefit is best. Both parties in the transaction must remain players in the game long enough for a move and a response to be completed. There is a natural marriage of interests between any two intelligent species—if their intelligence is roughly the same, their resources, their ability to benefit each other.”

She talked to the pad. The little fairy cursor brought up more screens.

More Monument hieroglyphs appeared on the screen, in a column with the pidgin translation. It was farther than Montrose had ever read; farther than (as best he knew) Del Azarchel had ever read.

Rania said, “Here is a vector sum in the time-relation I call the Concubine Vector. It is when the natural marriage of interests is between unequal partners. The Concubine Vector defines how much abuse and exploitation the inferior partner can be expected to suffer. The mathematics are quite elegant, even if the idea is horrid. One can define precisely, for example, how much shoplifting a shop can tolerate before losing either profit or customers, or how much criminal activity a town should stand before they create a police force, and how much police corruption to endure before creating checks on police power. And so on.”

“So what does the Concubine Vector say?”

“It does not say that the human race will be slaves forever to the machines of Hyades.”

“Good!”

“Only for many tens of millennia.”

“No good.”

“It is, strictly speaking, indentured servitude, not slavery outright, since the laws defined by the Cold Equations require they manumit the race as soon as we have paid back value equal to what it took to conquer us, plus a reasonable profit, of course.”

“Bugger them. They got no right to conquer us and make us pay for it. That’s just stupid. And why are they doing this? And why are they bragging about it? Why post their plans up on this Monument for all and sundry to see?”

“Because the Cold Equations require mutual communication for the natural marriage of interests to work, even within this ‘Concubine Vector’ of unilateral exploitation. The math itself shows things go more badly for both conqueror and conquered if both sides do not know exactly the rules and limits of the other.”

“Okay. So why were you crying with joy?”

“Because I can redeem us. Pay the price they ask. Isn’t it clear?”

“As mud at midnight, it is.”

She tapped two of the little lines of alien math, so that the image rotated, and slid over to another side of the Monument segment, and overlapped a different group of Celtic knots. The negative spaces formed glyphs in the same Monument notation.

“I am called away: and you, if you will come.”

“God himself could not stop me. Away to where?”

“Can’t you read it?” She seemed surprised.

“Not at a glance, when I’m sleep-fogged. What’s it say?”

“It defines our destination.”

In his imagination, he turned the Monument hieroglyphs into an emulation code that he ran in the back of his mind and formatted the results as a visual image: the mighty spiral of the galaxy, arms of billions of stars reaching through clouds and streamers of nebulae, through flocks of frozen planets, rivers of interstellar asteroids, and belts of dark matter, million-year-old storms of energy, gravity stress-points, and all the other minutia the Monument Builders tracked.

Overlaid was a spiderweb of lines representing divarication and information cascade functions, representing political lines of control.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

“I see something interesting. The Hyades Domination is just a collaboration of slave races themselves. They are janissaries; fighting slaves. They belong to a higher power.”

6. Star Map

The Hyades Cluster, at 151 lightyears away, was not the top of the system of lines representing the hierarchy. Functions connected it to the Praesepe Cluster in Cancer, some 550 lightyears away.

Praesepe was shown as the ascendant power in control of the local area of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. The Monument described traffic and control leading not just from Praesepe to the civilization in the Hyades Cluster, but also controls leading to Xi Persei in the California Nebula (1500 lightyears from Sol), the Pleiades (440 lightyears), M34 in Perseus (1400 lightyears), and the Orion Nebula (1600 lightyears) centered at the Trapezium Cluster. The notation showed this last location was the center of engineering activity, where the native civilization was making new stars. Praesepe also ruled the civilizations centered in the Coma Berenices Star Cluster, centered on the A-type binary 12 Comae Berenices: According to the Monument, one star of the pair had been artificially agitated to extreme stellar output.

Six interstellar polities of unimaginable immensity were under the control of whatever ruled the Praesepe Cluster. No human empire, until the rise of the Hermeticists, had learned how to control even so small a dustspeck as that third of the Earth which happened to be dry land, much less conquering and occupying other worlds, gas giants, stars, interstellar clouds of dust. These far-reaching supercivilizations seemed concentrated only in immense clusters of matter-energy, such as star-clusters where the stars were thick, nebula where new stars were being formed.

And yet there was something above and beyond even the Praesepe civilization and its half-dozen servitor civilizations: orbital elements described traffic between this and M3 in Canes Venatici, a globular cluster outside the rim of the galaxy, some 33,900 lightyears distant.

“How do you translate these three glyphs?”

“I think they are proper names, or, rather titles. The first one you translated—back when you were Baby Stinky—as referring to a superior power confronting an inferior, and you called it ‘Hegemony.’ Note the best translation, because it is not merely political superiority, but intellectual, a matter of further time-binding. I called it ‘Domination.’ The notation measuring information volume and matter-energy consumption says that they are so far above us that they can have only a master–servant relationship. A man who owns many flocks to a shepherd-boy.

“The next stands in like ratio with the first: a transcendent authority. I called it ‘Dominion.’ They are as far above us as a shepherd above a sheepdog, a creature that can serve its purposes in a limited way, and can have a reciprocal master–pet relationship, but not a contract. The Dominion is seated at the Praesepe Cluster, relatively near to us.

“But look. Even they are beholden to a power beyond. Whatever holds authority at M3, in Canes Venatici, is represented by the symbol reflected on itself twice, representing two orders of magnitude: it indicates the extension of influence in every direction. An absolute power, a form of being that never ceases to replicate and expand itself. An absolute Authority. It stands to us as a man stands to the benevolent or malevolent microbes or protozoa living in his sheepdog’s stomach, something of interest to the shepherd only insofar as it might prove useful or harmful.”