His theory was that the pallid substance was able to make a mold and to replicate each subatomic particle and part of a living brain as it intersected the surface, as if in a three-dimensional photograph, or, since the motions in time were captured, four dimensional.

He thought the whole of the eleven-lightyear-wide cluster-core Dyson oblate surface, each square lightyear of it, each square inch, was an interface surface for receiving and issuing information, neural information, any pattern that could hold a thought, to and from each of the arms of the main galaxy. Nothing else, or so Oosterhoff claimed, could explain the location of so much activity, so many superhuman civilizations, cramped together into one small globular cluster high above the North Pole of the galaxy, with all the stars spread out underneath like a map.

Oosterhoff thought the whole Dyson oblate was a brain. The crowded star systems and collapsed dark stars inside were part of the thinking system, the nerve cells, and the surface of a cortex larger than worlds.

He thought the pallid wall was alive and that it would emulate any living thing attempting to merge with it. This was the simplest and more straightforward way of welcoming a first contact from a creature of unknown biology, background, and capacity.

Theory? Call it a wild guess. An inspired guess, but wild. He said it had come to him in a dream.

The idea has an odd and alluring simplicity to it. Any creature, like the race of man, too foolish to know the whole eleven-lightyear-wide surface was an open invitation would be too foolish to be worth the time to welcome in. And how else could they have made a welcome mat? They would not erect an airlock nor spacedock.

The Authority Minds were expecting planet-sized bodies made of logic diamond or ringworlds wider than the solar system to plunge inside, not hollow metal ships filled with air and water and talking animals.

And so Oosterhoff maneuvered the frame to within an inch of the surface and shoved his head in, as you would shove it into a bubble of water in zero gee. Or into a lake of living water.

He thought the water would enter his brain, eat his brain, make his thoughts part of the alien mental process, and that they would speak to whatever ghost or reflection of his consciousness was mocked into life. He thought he would come out again. He thought he would live again, be himself again. If an atom-by-atom and particle-by-particle copy of you down to the finest level is not you, then you are not you to begin with.

Did he fear for his soul? I think he did not. I had this same talk with Ximen when he was afraid of his Exarchel he dreamed to build, like Koshchey in the old opera hiding his soul in an iron-bound box. What is the soul? It is not in my hand or heart or eye. It has neither location nor composition. To speak of the soul as being inside two brains, an original and a copy, makes no more sense and no less than to speak of the soul as being inside the two halves of one brain. It is not something that can be put inside an iron box; that is a fable for children. Eternal things are not inside anything inside the cosmos. My marriage is not inside my ring.

Oosterhoff’s body jetted away from the surface, spraying blood and venting oxyhelium from his severed neckpiece.

And I was alone.

13. Haunted

I began to see Jehan Oosterhoff’s head reflected in shining surfaces in the ship, a dull screen or a metal hatchframe, but there was nothing when I turned to look.

Once, about a month later, I saw the shadow of a severed head in the bridge armillary from where I floated in the hatch, but when I kicked and entered the chamber, there was nothing. A month after that, it appeared again, directly opposite me on the exercise carousel, pinned to the surface by the rotation, looking up at me, eyes eager, mouth smiling, red neck stump bleeding.

His eyes looked like yours. He had the looked of augmentation, of superintelligence. The aliens had expanded his brain to a higher level.

One watch as I sat in the carousel meditating, my legs folded into a full lotus position, my mind in a new topological space for which we have no word, neither dreaming nor awake, his head was in my lap. He smiled. I could see, hear, and smell it. It had mass. It was real.

Oosterhoff spoke.

You are born of the Monument, and within you is something even the Authority does not comprehend. Beyond this projection, I cannot accumulate enough attention in their system to stabilize myself.

I will be consumed by greater minds, more useful to the terrible, grim purposes of M3. You will not be consumed, but cherished.

My helmet circuits and the suit instruments around me created a blur in the four-dimensional photograph the surface took of me as I intersected it, so I am not whole.

Someone of your weight, build, and age can survive vacuum for seventy seconds. Remember to empty your lungs of air or breathing fluids. You can expel yourself from the sideboat airlock by blowing the explosive hinge bolts.

Or you can wrap yourself in an oxygen bubble of thin membrane and launch yourself toward the surface at sufficient speed to be carried forward by momentum when the bubble pops. Test this on a few empty suits first.

I said, “Prove you are real!”

You first.

“That is not an answer.”

He smiled. All answers are within. Come and see.

And then he was gone. I could feel the warm spot on my leg where the back of his head had rested.

The vision convinced me. I will follow Oosterhoff. I will strip myself of everything and enter naked.

Not everything.

I will keep my wedding ring on my finger.

14. A Last Thought

My last thoughts will be of you, beloved. I have faith that you still live.

You are too brave and fierce and fine to let a small thing like death and entropy overcome you, nor the nigh-eternal gulfs of time.

I will not say farewell—for I shall gaze into your eyes with my eyes again, your brave and deep and handsome eyes, where imps of strange humor and rustic courage dance and swim. How I miss the look in your eyes, the only eyes that never seem dull to me, never empty, never cowed! No one else can surprise me or make me laugh.

Even though all sense says to doubt it, nonetheless I pray that you made amends with my stepfathers among the Landing Party I left on Earth, and that you shared with each other the breakthroughs in suspended animation and computer emulation needed to bring all of you forward across the ages until the day I return.

Perhaps you think me slyer than an obedient wife should be, but I arranged that you would have sole control of the long-term hibernation technology, and Ximen would have control of the emulation systems, which would require you to work together.

I foresee that if you ever put aside your differences, you will come to love each other as brothers and know that I love you both. I hope you are not foolish enough to duel him; he is a better shot and is likely to win.

I pray that all the Hermeticist crew won your forgiveness and will be waiting to greet my return. You must forgive what they did. What they will suffer if they do not repudiate the mutiny and murders on the ship! It will haunt them in life and punish them after death with more horror than any human court of law can bring. As for their other crimes, you must understand how lonely they were when they returned to Earth and found all their nations gone, the laws they thought would protect them forgotten, the culture and civilization alien and odd.

And they had the means to rule and, with my help, to bring peace.