The magnetic tether holding us to the bowsprit neutron star was severed so that deceleration brought us into contact with the star mass. We could not survive the gravity, but had to retire permanently to suspended animation, waiting and hoping for the ion drive our robots had constructed out of the starlifting mines on the fore side of the dead sun would hold out against particle collisions.

But the cloud of gas surrounding the star cluster of M3 was unexpectedly denser than that around the Milky Way. The dead star endured near-lightspeed collisions with motes too small to see, but which, within our frame of reference, were more massive than Jupiter. Several configurations of magnetic fields and ionic reaction induction arrays were tried, but I could not find a way to have my exhaust issuing from the fore hemisphere of the dead star without placing some equipment on that side of the star, hence without a stellar mass to act as a shield between it and the deadly dust.

Then Ximen committed suicide.

He thought I could bring peace wherever I was. Perhaps I can, perhaps not, but I cannot bring life to one whose love for life is gone and whose impiety allows him to mar the human soul within him, yes, even within a machine.

I stayed awake at the microphone for nine long watches, talking to him, trying to reach him. Had you been here, my strong darling, you would have thought of something. You are not very bright in some ways, but you see things with your heart I cannot. You understand Ximen.

My heart was cold and lonely then. Yearning for you, I saw nothing.

If only some of my old crew had been here, they would have saved the Iron Ghost of Ximen. How I miss them! Artiga and Avenzoar, Echegaray and Falero, Zacuto and Zuazua! I think I miss Sarmento most of all, whose name means golden isle.

There had been a bond of unity among my stepfathers, the brotherhood of a gang of pirates who share one guilt, the compassion of a family with only one daughter, a pride in being the first men to sail the stars. It was a unity which I could not reproduce.

Ximen is from Andalusia and lived his life in war; D’Aragó (as his name says) is from unhappy, plague-burned Aragon; Father Reyes is from Goa in India, and he suffered for his race as well as for his faith; Sarmento i Illa d’Or is from the Saint Simon’s Island, and lived through the turmoil as Florida and Georgia rebelled against their Cuban overlords. All were rough men from rough times. Ximen thought that life requires sacrifice.

Perhaps it was not suicide. I pray it was not. Is it suicide when a man thrusts his living body into a hull break to save his crewmates from decompression, even though he dies himself?

Ximen redirected the ship’s power away from himself and into the gravitic lance. The long axis of the ship was blasted and burned, and all instruments overloaded, but not before Ximen successfully triggered the collapse of the Diamond Star entirely into a singularity in such a way as to form two vents, fore and aft. Even had the bore of the instrument not shot through the logic crystal of his brain, there was not enough power available to maintain his emulation and to overload the lance.

The fore vent of the collapsed star continued to slow us down from the insanity of warped near-lightspeed ever closer to normal spacetime; the rear vent I caught in my deceleration sails, and thus the neutron star decelerated the vessel as it pulled ahead.

The visual hemisphere ahead and behind the craft grew normal. We could see the half million stars of the M3 cluster in our direction of motion, and the vast, luminous spiral of the milky way, round as a shield, directly off the ship’s rearward-facing bow. Of the strange wonder of the galactic core, the meaning of the signals hidden in its polar x-ray vent, what I saw and deduced as the first astronomer in human history unhindered by intervening dust clouds, I will tell you when we meet again, for I will not speak of divine things where alien machines might overhear.

Despite all, our deceleration was not enough. Ximen had known his death was a magnificent but meaningless gesture.

The simplest calculations showed that we would pass through the star cluster at half the speed of light, out the far side, and back into the starless dark, never to encounter any star nor world or molecule again, and moving too slowly for there to be any appreciable relativistic effects. We were fated to pass through and face a void too empty for any hydrogen ramjet, even one whose intake cone was larger than the outer orbit of a solar system, to gather fuel.

The slumber coffins broke down. Without Ximen to run the genetic emulations, crewmen were waking with cancers and neural aberrations. Doomed, childless, our mission a failure, lacking all hope, while I slumbered, one crewman committed suicide, and then a second.

I foreswore all slumber thereafter, greatly blaming myself. Ximen thought I could bring peace. What use is bringing peace if the threat is not war but despair?

9. The Emulation of Hope

I searched the records of the Monument carefully, looking to see if there were other codes for messengers and emulations like myself, messengers to bring hope.

I found something. Something odd. I coded the Monument notation line by line into the empty crystal core of the Bellerophron section of the ship. I made my own little ghost, and it woke and spoke to me and told me what to do.

How like you I turn out to be! I made the cocktail of neural alterations just as instructed, and prayed, and meditated and injected myself.

In a dream I saw the unity of all things, and I walked outside of time and space. Here, there was another mind, in sympathy with mine, though vast beyond all description, issuing from one billion lightyears away. Because we both had entered the same framing sequence of synchronic semiotics, the ideas or forms overlapped, and we touched mind to mind. I was a droplet touching an ocean.

I woke the crew, and I spoke the words the massed coalition of living minds Corona Borealis Supercluster of Galaxies had instructed me. I told them of the hope beyond the universe. I told them how small our current mission was and what the greater thing was that awaited us.

There were no more suicides then, no more talk of mutiny nor despair. We all knew it was not willed that we should fail, even if it were willed that we should die. Gaily, and with joyful hope, I and my crew awaited we knew not what.

For the ship began to slow more rapidly than the exhaust vent from the neutron star could account for. We checked and rechecked the readings, but there was no mistake.

It was a miracle. If only Ximen had waited for it.

A beam of energy from M3 had found our sails and was imparting deceleration momentum. The aliens had reach across space with their strange hands, spread their fingers, and caught us.

10. The Dyson Oblate

The Diamond Star remnant dwindled to nothing, and the singularity at its core evaporated in a burst of Hawking radiation. The twelve remaining living souls spent over fifty years in the alien deceleration beam, but by the end of that time, the last cryogenic suspension coffin we were taking turns to share had failed, and we all turned old and gray.

We passed a quarter million stars, roughly half the cloud. The number of young blue-white giant stars, and the symmetries and patterns of the variables, showed that the civilization here had been engineering stellar life cycles since roughly the Carboniferous Period. The Authority at M3 had been herding stars, triggering supernovas, and forming solar systems in the resulting nebulae to bring forth worlds where elements high on the periodic chart existed in abundance. They had been doing this since the years when, on Earth, amphibians and arthropods were reigning.