Montrose said, “Praesepe controls nine Dominions seated at star clusters and nebulae reaching from Sol past the Pleiades and the Trapezium Cluster to the dark Cone Nebula in Monoceros, twenty-seven hundred lightyears away. All of them must have clients and serfs and founding civilizations as well. That is a lot of folk to talk to. I bet Cahetel tried me out as an emissary for the same reason Ain wants the human race. Some quirk in our psychology, allow us to fight the mental environment, to try harder, to come out on top … some desperate drive…”

“Sexual drive,” said Del Azarchel.

Montrose said, “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

“Why are you here? For Rania. Why am I here? Same reason.” Del Azarchel shrugged. “It is true that certain of these races seem to have two sexes, at least at one time, in the far past and so therefore should be motivated by that basic, primal, caveman urge. Ah, but contemplate how long they have been artificial. Even when they download themselves into bodies of flesh and blood, everything is a handiwork, deliberate, and controlled. They are not allowing the raw energy of the evolutionary process to burst forth: whereas our younger race…”

Montrose said, “That is pure-quill unadulterated pee-yew stinkerino horse flop, Blackie, and you know it. There is something deeper. Something deep inside human nature, or … just maybe … something planted inside human nature…”

Del Azarchel said, “Are you thinking of something Ain said was impressed or impregnated into our very souls by the Monument? That is mere mysticism and obfuscation. How would it change the whole race? Only you, and I, and my dearest Rania now survive of the Hermeticist who touched the Monument. Unless you want to suggest something was enjambed or embedded at such a deep level, that we unknowingly passed these characteristics along to the Swans and Myrmidons, Foxes, and so on?”

“Or you could just poxing ask me, you lumphead, instead of guessing. I am right here.”

Montrose was startled, because he had not spoken.

Both men still stood knee deep in the ceremonial pool, letting the nanomachines in the water tend their wounds. Both men turned and peered, for the voice had come from a thick curtain of leaves nearby. The deep male voice, Montrose’s voice, was coming from a cluster of fairy figurines who were drifting closer.

The cloud of figurines now danced into a new configuration, forming the rough outline or caricature of a head with protruding ears, deep-set eyes, a large and out-thrust jaw. The four somber-faced fairies whose linked arms and legs formed the jaw flew up and down to make the mouth move. Two fairies in red pantaloons floated sidewise with their feet touching, acting as lips, and a fairy floating behind them, looking over her shoulder, flapped her short red cape to mimic the motions of the tongue.

“Well, that is a mite disturbing,” said Montrose.

Del Azarchel said, “So your security merely lets alien beings take over locked circuits and essential systems, while I have access to nothing aboard this ship but live like the Abbé Faria in the Château d’If! I am not even allowed to unlock the pantry!”

The floating insectoid face made of fairy women said, “Your ship knew who I was and unlocked the security for me. I am still me, Big Montrose, even if I’ve been out of touch a powerful long parcel of time, now. What happened back on Earth? I mean, after the Thirtieth Millennium. Rania turned out to be a fake? A copy?”

Montrose said, “How did you know?”

There was a five-second delay as the radio signals traveled from Twinklewink, the ship’s brain, to the ringworld and back again. His own voice answered him: “Because there is no other reason for you and Blackie to be sharing Rania’s supership that the Authority of M3 gave her as a gift. This ship passed through this area of space twelve thousand years ago, but everyone with a telescope saw her fly past, so everyone knows where she hails from.”

Del Azarchel said, “Rania christened her Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. The Wide Desolation of Heaven: this ancient expression was penned on maps where wastelands reserved for holy hermits stretched. Do you know why the Rania who was returned was a copy, not the real one?”

Again, a five-second delay. “Sure, that is simple enough. You put Rania together using code you did not understand, and there was something broken about her—ain’t that right, Blackie, you verminous excretion from the south end of a snake? You experimented on little girls and did not know what in the blue plague-bearing perdition you was doing, right? Did you guys figure out that the Monument had a missing message and that a fake message was covering the real one? You are both a mite slow-witted, so tell me to hold up if I be going too fast for the lumps of soup you call brains. On account of you are really stupid compared to me.”

Montrose said, “You know, I really am a small dollop of obnoxious, ain’t I? It’s a wonder I don’t get punched more often in the nose.”

Del Azarchel said, “Yes, Cow-hetel—or whatever you might call yourself—yes, we are aware that there is a recent message covering an older and redacted message coating the Monument.”

“Call me Big Montrose. That deeper message in the Monument got into Rania’s genes and then into her brain somehow. When she got downloaded into the M3 mind—which I deduce she must have done, ’cause otherwise no copy would have been made—that part was taken out of her.”

“Why?” asked Montrose and Del Azarchel together.

Five seconds passed. “Don’t know. But I do know this: someone smarter and older and more cunning than M3 is arranging things behind the scene. I’ve crunched some numbers on how unlikely it is that my life would end up the way it has and that I would arrive here, just in time to see you, one last time, before the big good-bye. It is so unlikely, that it cannot be coincidence. That it means something smarter than M3 is inside the real Rania, whoever made the real Monument. I assume you’ve figured out that the Monument Builders are good guys and the Monument Redactors are bad guys?”

“Ain told us this,” said Del Azarchel.

“What big good-bye? You can come with us!” said Montrose.

“You fool,” said Del Azarchel. “Big Montrose—or rather the corpse of Cahetel inhabited by Big Montrose—is about to be killed for our sake. There is no other way to overcome the scaling problem.”

Montrose answered with an obscenity.

Del Azarchel said archly, “Do you recall how difficult it was to come to the attention of Ain, who was merely rated at an intelligence level of one billion? Praesepe includes cognitive masses three times the size of Hyades, organized more finely and coherently, and must be in excess of an intellect of one quadrillion. One thought would require sixteen lightyears to travel from one end of Praesepe’s brain systems to another. Have you studied the mathematical models of how bureaucracies and security systems must work? No matter how well they are designed, there are certain innate limits to how decision-making systems can be organized in a hierarchy, to keep information distortion losses at an acceptable level. Run the math using a quadrillion-level decision as a model; make it a simple yes-no decision, requiring very little oversight, but assume a confirmatory decision loop at every maximal node point in the game structure. Do you see?”

Montrose ran through a few million calculations in his head, then opened his eyes and said, “Is that how you overcame and absorbed all the other minds swimming in the vast mind ecology of Jupiter? You were able to outmaneuver their decision-action structure?”

But, a moment later, Big Montrose said, “Blackie has been thinking about how to corrupt and suborn intelligences superior to his own since the very beginning, starting with Rania when she was six or seven, or back when I was aboard the Hermetic, out of my mind from mental overload. That is how he kept Exarchel loyal for as long as he did. His system of subversion, I would guess, is based on finding short paths and shortcuts through the neural hierarchy.”