M3 was distant. It was farther away from Sol than the center of the galaxy was. If the galactic disk were laid out like a dinner plate, M3 would be like a dandelion puff floating almost directly above it. The Monument script gave figures (expressed in terms of the unit of the energy liberated from the fission of one hydrogen atom with an antihydrogen atom) for the power use of the civilization at M3, and the symbols hinted at some aspects of their technology.

Menelaus reminded himself that, in the language of astronomers, a star cluster was nothing like a globular cluster. Hyades and Praesepe were clusters: Hyades held perhaps four hundred stars, and in Praesepe, three hundred fifty were visible. Whereas a globular cluster was an immensity, typically holding half a million to a million stars. Globular clusters were scattered like flying sparks ranging far above and below the main disk of the galaxy. The zone where globular clusters were found occupied a sphere centered on the galactic core, composed of older stars of low metallic properties.

In a globular cluster, the stars were packed close. On average, one would be next to its neighbor no farther away than perhaps six times the radius of Neptune’s orbit, so the skies of any worlds in that crowded space would be densely filled with stars brighter than Venus at sunset, glowing clouds of light rather than scattered constellations. To the human eye, it would be a star dazzle too bright to stare at for long.

M3 had more variable stars than every other globular cluster in the galactic halo. The cluster included a large number of so-called Blue Stragglers, main sequence stars apparently much younger than the rest of the cluster: but only apparently. Macroscale Engineering had meddled with the core processes of the stars, throwing them out of their normal evolution.

The whole cluster of M3 stars was itself on an eccentric orbit around the galactic core, moving from 22,000 lightyears at galactic perigee, to 66,000 at galactic apogee. The orbit was canted oddly, to dip 44,000 lightyears above and below the main galactic plane.

Certain orbital elements and epochs given in the Monument revealed that the original orbit had been far more conservative, coplanar with the main disk of the galaxy. The reason for the massive orbital adjustment of this group of half a million stars was not revealed in the relatively crude mathematical sign-language being used.

The idea of a race that could casually sweep a globular cluster into a new orbit around the core of the galaxy left Menelaus awed and horrified.

The imagination of Menelaus for a moment was filled with a menagerie of cat-faced men, or centaurs, three-eyed people, hawk-men and crab-people and zebra-men, worm-creatures or intelligent trees, or dwarfish things with glowing eyes and ballooned skulls. But no: these were merely images from his childhood toon-tales. All that was revealed in the Monument hieroglyphs were energy levels, expressed in terms of multiples of the output of the Diamond Star, and additional mathematical expressions showing the composition of megascale engineering structures.

He told himself these beings could be something much stranger than his simple imaginings. Or even creatures to whom the question of form was meaningless: beings with a science to reshape their bodies and minds at will, to fit any task confronting them. Creatures of pure information.

But what tasks? What was this conquest for?

Montrose muttered, “These are beings of pure mind. Creatures beyond life. Something incomprehensible, someone from beyond the Asymptote. Beyond the event horizon of what we can ever understand. That’s the enemy.”

Rania surprised him by saying, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

In the moment before he recognized the source, he thought it might be Shakespeare, perhaps from some play where bold Scottish kings drew swords in defiance against tyrannical angels. He frowned when it dawned on him that it might be preacher-talk. But Menelaus noticed that hearing it in her dovelike voice, the Good Book seemed not to have that harsh tone, a weird combination of ghostly terror and dusty-hearted killjoy platitudes, it carried back in the days when his mother quoted it to him, or that lying no-account Parson Goodwin from Carl’s Corner in Hill County. It almost sounded like poetry.

“Quoting the scriptures?” he said. “And here I though you were raised by scientists.”

She was too ladylike to snort, but she did made a noise of disdain in her nose, softer than the sigh of a nightingale. “Scientists including the Franciscan-trained Father Reyes y Pastor, who made sure we had onboard the same Bible Mendel, Copernicus and Lemaître studied.”

“Mass limits were tight,” said Montrose. “I was not even allowed to bring socks.”

“You think it an unnecessary luxury? I agree, the scriptures might have been no good for settling issues of astrophysics, but when I was told how my mother passed away, I read the Book of Job, and I looked down at the stars. This book asked me who laid the cornerstone of the cosmos when the morning stars sang together and what made the Sons of Light all shout for joy? It asked if I could bind the influence of the clustered Pleiades or free the bands of Orion?”

He saw a hint of sorrow in the shake of her silhouetted head. Rania continued, “Those questions comforted me in my grieving, even though I could not answer them; and the answers of science, firm and certain, could not. Through science I deduced, as you did, how I was born, but science, the mere study of matter in motion, will never tell me why.”

“Down at the stars?”

“Stars were never ‘up’ until I reached Earth; the ship carousel, spun for gravity, puts the portholes under your feet, and all the universe is a void to fall into.”

“You know your mom weren’t real.”

“Do mothers not love their stillborn child? I mourned her loss, even if she never lived.”

“You are strange girl.”

“Since you and I, and perhaps by now Ximen, are the only members of our new species, homo sapiens posthomonid, by any rational basis of comparison, not only am I average, I form the only data point.”

Montrose, rather than argue the point, bent his head over the bookpad and read her translation of line 2311 and 2312 of the Xi Segment.

THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE … WHEN FOUND AMONG STARS IN THE ORION ARM BETWEEN THE FOLLOWING EONS AND LOCATIONS [measurements were given in terms of multiples of plank lengths and fractions of proton-decay periods. The volume thus defined included Sol] … NECESSARY FOR SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION [meaning uncertain] … DONE AT THE BEHEST OF AUTHORITY OF M3 GLOBULAR CLUSTER, WHOSE [SERVANTS] DOMINION AT PRAESEPE CLUSTER ORIENT FINAL CAUSATION TO CONFORM TO THIS DIRECTIVE; WHOSE [PETS] DOMINATION AT HYADES CLUSTER PERFORM THE [INSIGNIFICANT] MANUAL LABOR INVOLVED.

“Let me get this straight. On Earth, ten thousand years go by before the little green men even show up. Then another Brazilian vermilion cotillion years go by before we get back from M3 with the court’s verdict. And we don’t know if the court will rule in our favor, because who’s to say their laws and whatnot will stay the same for so long?”

“They are starfarers: they must honor thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past a thousand lightyears. They must honor ten-thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past ten thousand lightyears. What is the upper radius value for the ambition of M3? We cannot say. But look: their name in this concept-writing means they extend in all directions without limit.”