Mickey said, “I have noticed in myself that often some smallest thing, which spine of which book my eye first falls on when I enter a library, or the pattern of omens seen in birds, will remind me of some memory or another, and provoke one thought or another. Anyone able to know beforehand how each stray thought of mine might fall out for each stimulus could arrange books or birds or whatever else was needed—a burp of indigestion, an invisible bump in the road—to provoke my thoughts into the predicted path and do all this without once manipulating the actual brain substance itself.”

Montrose said, “No one knows me that well, not even me.”

Del Azarchel said, “If some higher supremacy has solved the fundamental problem of chaos mathematics, so that the unexpected results of complex problems could indeed be anticipated with this degree of precision—”

Torment said, “Gentlemen, what you are describing is not a new branch of mathematics but a new way of envisioning reality in its cosmic unity. Such an ability is incomprehensible. How would it circumvent Heisenberg limits on certainty of particle position and mass? How would it avoid categorical paradoxes of determinism and volition?”

Mickey said, “Then how do you account for the Judge of Ages and the Master of the Empyrean being led here, each against his will, neither with his knowledge?”

Torment said, “I do not account for it. Where there are no data, there can be no theory.”

Mickey said, “You called me, great goddess. How is this not your doing?”

Torment said, “I am only a Potentate. I possess no such ability. I constructed this remote body in this location once I understood it to be the destination of the summons calling these two men here. Your bodies are slow and gross, whereas I am swift and subtle, so I was here hours in advance. However, I can provoke no reaction from the emissary. It wants to talk to you.”

The three men stood (or, rather, hovered with their boots or sandals anchored) in silence a moment, each wrestling with the impossible and obvious conclusion that Ain had called them here.

Montrose said slowly, “You know, come to think of it, I do not remember why I decided to download my brain into a Patrician body…” And he turned certain specialized sense organs in his nervous system toward the core of the moonlet.

His senses were suddenly jarred into activity, as were the pattern-recognition system, linguistic and chemical, in his multitiered nervous system. It was like staring into a suddenly unhooded lantern.

4. Communication Splendor

With his Patrician senses, Menelaus Montrose could see that the random Brownian motions of the molecules in the logic diamond at his feet no longer seemed random. From dozens, if not hundreds, of point sources studded along the trunks of the thirty-foot-tall dendrite before him, energy packages, mostly of neutrino and neutrons locked in artificially stabilized isotopic structures, like freakish atoms lacking both electrons and protons, were playing back and forth between the other three dendrites below the close horizon, but visible through the transparent crust and core of the moonlet.

It was a vast and intricate dance of three-dimensional geometries forming patterns within patterns.

He recognized the patterns instantly. The False Rania had brought back a complete translation and thorough analysis of the eleven-dimensional Monument notation syntax. Present in his environment on a molecular scale, extending for miles through the silent diameter of the electromagnetically neutral vacuole, were four of the eleven communication dimensions arranged in notation. Every crooked or circular motion of the neutron dance traced out yet another set of patterns within patterns, cycles within epicycles.

It was like stepping into a cathedral carved by generations of obsessive madmen, who had covered each stained-glass window with images and symbols trembling with layers of meaning, wrote anagrams on each floor tile and shaped each letter of each riddle into the forms of fabulous many-headed animals, each with its own heraldic meaning, and also erected pillars, arches, fonts, and statues in the poses and postures of the dance who marble hands and white fingers all pointed toward some central sanctum sanctorum of meaning, paradoxically simple, impossibly profound.

It was a work of art, a poetry of balanced signs and signifiers, beyond his capacity to comprehend, greater than any artwork of man or Potentate or Power, yet set here, for him, dashed off as quickly and simply as a picture postcard.

This was not only on a different type of communication but a different philosophy of communication. Anyone sending a set of neutron particles in the proper and matching pattern against one or several of the signs or concepts imprinted on the surrounding spacetime would provoke a return pattern of symbols. It was like a chess-playing machine, or, more to the point, it was like one of the adventure cartoons he’d read as a child, where each different character choice at the end of each file opened a different story line. The Principality of Ain had written out every possible nuance of reply and response to any question he was capable of formulating according to the rule of Monument notation grammar. The moonlet was far more intelligent than any man and could pass any Turing test with ease, but it was a passive intelligence, a reactive consciousness, like talking to a sleepwalker.

Montrose himself could not stimulate the neutron particle pattern into motion, since he did not have a supercollider built into his Patrician body. Torment, however, did have a ground-based accelerator at her south pole that could generate the particle patterns and direct them in a sufficiently fine pinpoint pattern through atmosphere and vacuum to the moonlet to provoke the moonlet substance to react. Her puppet body here on the moonlet acted like a forward observer calling in artillery support.

The conversation was necessarily a very slow one. It was over a year before it was concluded.

But the Ain Emissary was surprisingly blunt and forthcoming.

5. The Artifact

A.D. 73724

The dialogue took place in multiple parallel channels, not in chronological order, with long digressions and dead-end loops and odd epiphanies that retroactively changed the several meanings written in the previous layers of neutrino patterns. And there were a frustratingly high number of miscues, when a stimulus from Montrose or Del Azarchel, speaking through Torment, would return a null response, due to grammatical or conceptual incompatibility.

Montrose entered the labyrinth of signs and responses several times, but the one time he penetrated most closely to the center was from a humble opening. He stimulated the signifiers to spell out the concepts. “What is the meaning of these events?”

The emissary pattern of the Principality of Epsilon Tauri replied in this way: The meaning you already have deduced. Events were arranged to summon you here.

To which Montrose added, “Why us?”

You two embody the most meaningful nodes of the probability wave of the undecided phenomenon which the close approach of Torment of Iota Draconis to Ain of Hyades, in all its multivariable complexity, soon will collapse into being.

Montrose said, “Phenomenon? Singular? You regard us as one system? Me, him, the planet, the mental ecology, everything? But we are independent! I am not part of no damned logic ball at the core of the planet.”

Ain of Hyades finds it convenient to regard the whole set of the information flows passing from your various nervous activities, to other humans, and up the scale of intellect to Torment, and from thence back to the Empyrean system from which you come, to be a unified web of meaning. Transmogrification enhances that meaning by turning inanimate aspects of your corporate body into self-aware aspects, each contributing to the whole. What was, what shall be: it is all one.