It is best to say cruel things quickly: I left you. To save our dream, yours and mine, I resolved not to return to Sol for you.

He challenged me, saying that if I had faith in you, I would depart the galaxy and know you will await my return. If I agreed, he would meld his ship with mine, doubling our supply of needed goods and granting us the calculation power needed to convert the Diamond Star to a reaction mass.

It was calculation ability I needed. The engineering would have been impossible without him. The Bellerophron was disassembled and reassembled along the spine of the Hermetic and became her after sections. The combined ship anchored herself magnetically to the lee of the star at 300 AU trailing behind, in a vacuole my design placed in the pattern of sunspots, which were the exhaust chambers of a sun turned into a rocket. We took flight trailing behind our engine.

Never has there been so much fuel mass for so little payload! The star was held before us as a shield against the fast-moving particles, made absurdly dangerous by our velocity, each grain of dust more massive than a neutron star. But any explosion of our sun merely increased our speed.

When I later discovered how to impart a gravitic eddy to the planetary core and trigger a supernova, my speed much increased. Do you know what my greatest fear was then? That astronomers on Earth would detect the burst of radiation and think my ship had been destroyed in a collision.

2. The Rituals of Serenity

I have not enough words to praise the bravery of the crew. It was not physical dangers they faced, though those were great, but the endless pressure on the human spirit of the emptiness of an indifferent cosmos.

The crew was human and regarded me, during their watches when they woke from suspended animation, with increasing reverence and love that I was careful not to allow to grow into an idolatry. The Monument we towed, and I established a small pressurized hut anchored to its surface that I might study the symbols and their layers of meaning.

Within that deeper message, I saw what to do, say how cliometry could operate even at the smallest scales, if one were willing to make the self-sacrifice needed and never to surrender to doubt, to fear, to expediency.

Then there came the single, still hour when I meditated within the armillary sphere of the bridge, when I suddenly understood from the Omicron Segment how to augment my intelligence vastly. It could be done to me with the wire-to-nerve systems I already had established with Ximen’s Iron Ghost, as my neural makeup was already based on Monument sequences. But I saw it could not apply to the human crew with me, without a rewrite of the genetic basis of their nervous systems and the neural basis of thought. If there had been a hundred Ximen emulations with us, that answer might have differed.

But if the gulf between captain and crew opened too wide, the cliometry, as well as my troubled heart, showed that if they came to fear me or came to worship me, then mutiny was inevitable.

I quietly resolved in that hour to defy the inevitable. I had faith in my men, in their loyalty. They would sculpt their own fate.

So we played games. I instated rituals of my own invention based on a microscale cliometric model. These included small customs, exchanges of words and salutes, but also used the recreation times and a scoring system of heraldries and displays to fortify the faint. Games alter outlook, introduce intellectual vectors, train the amygdala, and can be used to emulate behaviors, form metaphors, promote loyalties and sportsmanship. It was what my father, the original captain, never imagined. I don’t think even Narcís would have killed a man who had been his spinward goalie in the cargo-bay ball playoffs.

One set of game rites allowed me private time, each year I woke, with each crewman, one by one, a shared ritual meal. By this I could learn and understand. I could know to which watches and rites and teams to assign him. Also, I had the ship’s chaplain reinstitute the old, old sacraments of confession and Eucharist to strengthen the souls of the whole complement.

And yet, despite all, the darkness was so vast.

Departing from the dust cloud surrounding the galaxy decreased our risk of death by collision, but also cut our fuel supply. The star’s magnetosphere had been converted by the ring of starlifting satellites to a ramjet scooping up interstellar hydrogen. That was Ximen’s doing. He is a clever one.

After the Diamond Star was exhausted to half mass, crumbled into a neutron star, our ship flew without any cheering light as our bow lantern.

The starless darkness, the sight of the white fires of creation behind us, the coal-red glow like purgatory ahead, it preyed on them. At half mass, the crew knew that I could not have returned the ship to the Milky Way even had I ordered it, only brought us to rest relative to it.

3. The Mutineers

Ximen, as my first mate, was cruel, insisting only strictest rigor would keep the humans at their posts. I unfolded the cliometry, which showed this was not so, but he could not follow it. Ah, I underestimated how wounded he would be to know himself not the wisest one aboard! I asked him to trust me, and both my heart and the calculus of cliometry showed he would. But both were wrong.

During years while I slept, he spread madness through the crew, and the strange belief that their lives on Earth were a dream, a computer simulation, that Ximen had created the small, warped, starless universe we inhabited, including our false memories. The universe was no bigger than our ship surrounded by the smeared light of an egg of distorted spacetime.

Ximen, without my knowledge, had stolen cells from my ovaries and bone marrow. It was a theft of my very soul, a rapine and an abomination I pray I will someday learn how to forgive. By the time I had discovered, they were fertilized and could not be destroyed. Why he did this, what he intended, seems clear enough: to raise up another captain in my place, for the cliometric extrapolation would not allow this ship’s delicate psychological balance long to be preserved without me, or a substitute of me.

That part I understand. The larger question, even now, I do not. Why did he conspire against me, when he must have known I would foresee it? How did he imagine that I did not know? Did he think my forbearance was weakness? But he knew me better than that. He raised me.

I woke and spoke to the would-be mutineers long before the watch when they planned to take up arms and hostages, and offered them mercy and wives. I knew how to bring my many twin sisters to term, just as I had been, by using the medical coffins as artificial wombs; and I promised that the children of the loyal crewmen born of these daughters, once mature, would augment themselves to my level or beyond. I offered them a dream better than the sick dreams of Del Azarchel.

All but one agreed. The court-martial condemned him to death by recycling, but I commuted the sentence to close confinement to his slumber coffin.

4. The Daughters of Rania

More years passed, and the girls grew. It was cheering to have little ones aboard, bouncing from bulkhead to bulkhead, and their fathers loved them dearly. Now I understood what had kept my first crew alive, what my role had been. We are designed to live for others.

But then my little girls, intelligent and erratic, one by one by one, started to go mad. It was divarication errors. I cannot speak of this tragedy but most briefly.

After years of study, I saw a hidden meaning, as if there were an older and original Monument hidden beneath a redacted version. The editing was not clumsy, but the older authors cleverly had hidden symmetries of meaning, like internal rhymes, so that any changed segment which did not change the parallels in other segments could be easily seen.