“Oh, do not cast down your features, Dr. Montrose! Society survives in a decentralized form,” said the Jesuit. “The Giants spare any automatic factories, provided the electronic brains housed there are Mälzels or ratiotechnology, thinking machines, not xypotechnology, self-aware machines. A single Giant can carry the download of an entire library needle in his head. I myself, with merely very minor neural augmentations, have both photographic memory, linguistic and mathematical savant abilities, spatial proprioception that establishes perfect direction sense, and the ability to speak the high-speed data-compression language.”

“And what happened to Exarchel?”

Brother Roger said, “No copy of him remains anywhere on Earth. With the total shutdown of the infosphere, his power is broken forever!”

“Forever?”

“For a hundred years!” The Jesuit smiled.

“That is not as long a time as you might think.…”

The Jesuit pointed at one of the large and slanting windows. “There is the observatory.” Hanging in the air was a tall cylinder, slightly narrower at the top than at the base, and a ring of vast gas balloons surrounding its waist like a festive skirt. “We should have new plates developed at sunset.”

“That’s a pretty big telescope.” The cylinder was twenty meters in diameter, which made the instrument inside at least twice as big as the telescopes Menelaus recalled from his day. “And you must not get much distortion, if you can take her up to the stratosphere.”

“We also use the space mirrors as baselines, Doctor,” said Brother Roger. “Most of the Giants will cooperate with scientific ventures. Obviously they need technology to advance.”

“Obviously,” said Montrose. “Because they want to breed true, right? The offspring of Giants are humans?”

“Humans with various bone diseases, yes, Doctor,” said Brother Roger. “A group of scientific clans called the Simon Families was established by Og of Northumberland to solve that and other long-range multigenerational problems. The experiments are passed down from mother to daughter.”

“Do the Cetaceans have the same problem?”

Brother Roger spread his hands. “The Moreau, as we call those who dwell beneath the sea, are not well known or well studied. All our shipping is by air these days, for the Moreau cannot survive an encounter with an aeroscaphe. The Exarchel is no longer in a position to supply them with jaw-launched missiles, and they cannot manufacture their own. More of us float above the sea than above land, since krill and plankton are easier for the hunger silk to absorb and convert than most land-based proteins.”

“Are you going to drive them into extinction?”

“Ah? Is that your wish, Doctor? That seems as harsh as your condemnation of the cities.”

“I was asleep! Did these Giants say I gave the order?”

Brother Roger looked troubled. “Say? You gave the order. The whole world saw you. It was your voice and image over the wire. What does this mean? Is someone acting for you, impersonating you?”

3. Glimpse of a Distant Star

Boarding was a simple but dizzying process of being passed from the airship serpentines to the observatory’s. The metal snakes handed Menelaus over as gently as a father picking a tot out of a baby carriage and into a mother’s waiting arms, but the moment of being exposed to the chill and thin winds of the upper air, with nothing underfoot and nothing to cling to, left him wishing he had taken up Woggy on his offer of a booth.

Ascending to the stratosphere was effortless: The huge balloon, after a polite warning, sealed all its pressure doors, and shed diamond dust in a long and glittering tail, and climbed.

This interior was as spartan as the Azurine had been luxurious. Menelaus found the photographic plates waiting for him, pinned to a steel bench next to a steel stool, with a lens on a cantilevered arm hanging above. To see images created by chemical emulsions seemed oddly old-fashioned, but the current range of nanotechnologically created chemical mixes could react more sensitively to various wavelengths, including gamma and X-ray, shortwave and infrared, than any digital receptors.

There was no completely trustworthy calculating machine nor library cloth available in this technophobic age, but Brother Roger was able to give him the basics of the high-speed compression language, and any calculations Menelaus could not do in his head, Menelaus could squeal and click in a single quick throat-rasp to Brother Roger, whose intuitive grasp of notational mathematics was almost as good as his own. Menelaus used him to double check his work for errors.

The first plate showed merely a large circular smear of light with a smaller one nearly. A distribution of infrared and microwave emissions caught on those plates indicated a contact point below the solar atmosphere.

Montrose said, “She’s had to overcome the problem that antimatter–matter reactions usually end up blowing most of the matter back toward the source. When a billiard-ball hits an anti–billiard-ball, the two balls are blown away from each other when the point of contact releases all its energy. You gotta push the two billiards together against their ignition pressure to maintain the explosion, and keep pushing. From the magnetic images, I reckon she is using the ring current from the mining satellites not just to focus the explosion like a jet cone, but also to hem in the fragments like an ignition cylinder. I would ask where she got the energy to ionize the whole metallic hydrogen core of the gas giant, but she’s sitting on top of the biggest energy treasure in the known universe, so I guess she just—”

He was interrupted by Brother Roger bringing the latest two plates. It was after sunset, and at 170,000 feet (thirty-two miles and change straight up) they were above the troposphere and in the stratosphere, the edge of outer space. The pressure outside the armored sphere of the life support was 1/1000 of sea level. Needless to say, the pictures were clearer than any mountaintop observatory.

There were two images: one magnetic, the other in the gamma ray spectrum.

Brother Roger passed him the magnetic image first. “There are a number of very puzzling features in this.…”

Menelaus barely glanced at the magnetic image. “You are getting a diffraction effect caused by the fact that she is using a second set of ring-current satellites to establish a magnetic ramscoop in front of the star. It is going to draw in hydrogen particles of terrene matter, loop them around to the aft end of the Diamond Star, and ram them into the antimatter vortex forming in the aft magnetic jet cone. The incoming particles will have greatly increased mass as she mounts up near to lightspeed, and so more energy will be released with the bombardment.”

In contrast, it was with a look of awe that Menelaus examined the high-energy image. He studied it with increasing excitement for long moments before he spoke. “There is no gamma ray count registered. That means the forty percent of pions created during total conversion which should be neutral somehow ain’t neutral. I’d say it’s impossible, but do you know what that means? The main problem with matter–antimatter conversion is that most of your mass is lost and wasted in dark matter like pi mesons. She has some method of charging them, so the axial electromagnetic field lines can grab them, focus them into the thrust before they decay into muons. She did it somehow, but I don’t know how. She did the impossible!”

He started to laugh with joy, but the meaning of the image suddenly struck him, and the laughter choked in his throat.

“Brother Roger, is this a mistake? The spectrographic reading along the bottom—someone must have flipped the plate into the camera backwards, or—or—”

“No, Doctor,” said the Jesuit, his face pale. “The image is red-shifted, not blue-shifted.”