He shook his head. “Let’s stick with our original plan. We go to the Diamond Star, no farther, gather up as much contraterrene as we can mine via star-lifting, return here, overthrow whatever stupid machine civilization Blackie has tried to set up—if it still exists, which I doubt—and start the long, slow process of building up the human race, and any posthuman races we might have the fancy to create, to fight the Hyades Armada. These equations are not only their advertisement of their intentions, they are also their marching orders—all we have to do is make the human resistance more expensive than it is worth to conquer us. Once there is no hope of profit, they’ll quit. I mean, aren’t we deciding everything on the assumption that these are machine civilizations, electronic brains that are forced to make judgments by these same calculations?”

Rania said, “If we make the human resistance more expensive, all they will do is extend the term of the indenture.”

“The Monument itself is millions of years old. The civilization at M3 could be long dead, or changed its laws, or fallen to war or—anything!”

“Nonetheless, in my capacity as Captain, this concerns matters beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and therefore falls into my jurisdiction.”

“I am not questioning the legality, but the judgment! Are you just acting on blind faith? What makes you think the monsters at M3 (a cloud of stars not even in this damn galaxy!) will respect what is written on that lump of rock circling the Diamond Star, or even be alive? Aren’t they changing and growing and dying, even if they are machine-things? What is your evidence?”

“The Monument expresses something never seen on Earth, a calculus of history, a science of which our economics and politics are mere unsystematic gropings, based on guesswork and sentiment. Their laws are deductions, not proscriptions, of how their future generations will and must behave, or, since they may long ago have solved the technical problems of decay and death, the future generations may be the selfsame individuals who wrote this promise.”

“But it could be a lie!”

“To what end? Why tell us the means of manumission if they meant us not to use it?”

“Hellfire! D’you expect me to understand how the bug-men living in pools of methane who eat their parents for lunch might think with their nine brains? What if it is fiction? A joke? Graffiti? A psalm in their religion that they only mean on Sunday? What if it is some emotion or custom or nerve-malfunction humans just don’t have that prompted them to write something for a reason we don’t and can’t understand?”

“The fact that the Monument itself is the product of a rational intelligence, a message deliberately set to be seen and read by all comers, allows us to suppose it means what it means until proven otherwise. Why do you assume the Armada from Hyades is real but deny that the Authority who can free us from the domination of the Armada is also real? Your skepticism seems to be unidirectional.”

“But that does not prove it!”

“Life is not a bench of law, nor a scientist’s workbench. We have partial information. A hint. A clue. Life allows us see a shadow in the darkness, and we must guess its true shape. But life forces us to decide, before we know with perfect knowledge, how we shall confront the unknown. Who gave you this foolish idea that evidence must be certain before it can be affirmed? Before us is the unknown. The universe is black and wide. The option to be all-knowing is not open to us. Our options are to act as if the unknown will bring us evil, which is the response called fear; or to act as if the unknown will bring us good, which is the response called hope. The first response is certainly self-fulfilling; the second may be.”

Montrose had no good answer for that, so he said, “It still sounds like blind faith.”

“Blind compared to what? All real life is decided by guesswork, intuition, judgment, determination, and not established by omniscience. Did you examine the future before you married me? Where is your evidence that our love will endure?”

“I fell in love. And I gave my oath. I will make it endure.”

“Well, I took an oath also, to find and carry out my purpose in life. Here I have found it. I will make the Authority at M3 to manumit the human race; I will make us starfarers. We will have the future, brilliant with glory, the human race has always dreamed of, and may yet deserve!”

He had no good answer for that, either, so he turned off the book and kissed her. He did not know if that would be the right thing to do, but he hoped it was.

17

Postwarfare Society

1. Called Out

He woke in the dark, disoriented, unable for a moment to remember where he was. Menelaus was aware of the emotion before he was awake enough to remember its reason: the fragrant warmth in his arms, the soft curvaceous body slowly breathing, the sensation of nude flesh cuddled against him. He remembered his joy before he remembered its cause.

I am a married man. I will never go to sleep alone, never wake up alone, not ever again. It was almost enough to make him believe in his stern old mother’s stern old God, just to have someone to thank.

A sensation of needles walking along his skin told him his arm, on which she was pillowed, had fallen asleep. He did not move his arm. He would have preferred to cut it off, rather than disturb her. In the dim light, he could see no more than the curve of her cheek near him, a hint of gold from the halo of mussed hair framing her head. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

What had wakened him? The pillow under his head seemed to be playing music.

No, not the pillow. He crumpled the pillow (awkwardly with his free hand) and saw beneath it, next to his ceramic knife, the red amulet of the Hermeticists, the one Vardanov had forced him to wear. A little ruby light, no brighter than a firefly, shined and winked in the metal, and three notes of music—the same notes that once had summoned Blackie to the Table Round—was playing insistently. That was a bad sign: he had set the refusal tolerance to nine, higher even than a police override or incoming subpoena could match.

Holding it in his teeth, he snapped it onto his wrist, and with his tongue he tapped the surface. Then Montrose blinked at a sudden illusion opening like a white window in space before him. The circuits in the metal wristband were firing pinpoint magnetics to activate specific phosphenes lining the rear of his eyeballs. The sensitivity and control was accurate enough to paint a blurry but recognizable image of a screen. Montrose thought the thing was damn creepy, shooting energy into his eyes, but it did not show any light or wake his wife.

An image formed like a ghost. It was Blackie Del Azarchel.

The crisis is here, old friend, and I regret to say I can think of but one way to stop it. Montrose had turned the sound off, so these words were being printed in Braille along the inside surface of the bracelet, the smart metal dimpling and flexing against the sensitive skin of his inner wrist.

He made sure the lip-reading application was running, so he could answer without talking aloud. His tongue and lips formed the words, “Blackie! You got some nerve, calling me now!”

He realized that Blackie—if this was a true image and not some jinx—was dressed in the heavy lobster-shell-like armor of a duelist. Only the helmet was off, and the long hair of Del Azarchel fell to his shoulders. It was a young face, with eyes burning, and the hair was black as ink.

Strangely enough, the armored image looked old, even archaic, a figure stepped from a musty history book, as if Menelaus, in a buried part of his brain, truly knew all the years that had passed since he last saw a foe adorned in such grim panoply.