“That is a scary thought,” said Montrose.

Big Montrose said, “Not as scary as Mickey the Witch being archbishop of the Hyades. Whoever convinced that fat bastard to get baptized? Did he give up whoring and hexing both?”

“He did it for a girl.”

“Well, can’t blame a guy for thinking with his rutting tool! Lack that, and what’s a man got?”

“So what the hell happened, you lip-flapping word-bag?”

“Putrefaction happened! Mickey sicced his Christian machine intelligences on Hyades, and so now they are making fusses about helping the poor and downtrodden, freeing slaves, not letting Hyades ship helpless millions out to hellhole planets without proper support or instruction, all that jazz. Last news I heard—keep in mind everything is five hundred years out of date, due to lightspeed—Mickey was thinking of organizing a Crusade. By now, the whole place is probably aflame with war. Leprous scabs and spores, but sometime it makes me proud to be Christian!”

Montrose said, “Yeah? No hoax? So when is the last time you did a rosary or novena or some penance?”

“Eh? What are those?”

Montrose said, “Said a prayer?”

“I said, ‘Hot damn!’ when I saw your ship come within range. That’s theological, ain’t it?”

Montrose said, “Pox your eyes, you cannot kill yourself. It’s a sin.”

Big Montrose said, “This is not killing myself. I am turning myself in for murder.”

“What?”

Big Montrose continued, “I was in despair when I let Cahetel consume me. I did it so that you could talk to him and save part of the human race. And that worked. But despair has a funny way of warping your brain. I turned into something like Blackie. If you remember, I was a lot that way already, clawing my way to the top of the Myrmidon race, making myself into the Nobilissimus, the Caesar. Well, stuck as a disembodied mind in the hell of Cahetel’s tool kit, I killed a few of my fellow tools. Some of these races don’t know what lying is. Some of them don’t have murder. So the tools and artificial minds they built don’t all have proper antibodies, white blood cells, cops, and suspicious natures. We humans have all that! And what would Rania think of a killer?”

Montrose said, “There has got to be some other way!”

Big Montrose said, “You did not even know I existed until a moment ago. And there is no other way. Do you understand why Pellucid was willing, that big, dumb horse, to die for us? And I can deduce from the clues here, and from the energy and radio traffic back near Sol, that the False Rania could not bring real peace. We all need the real Rania back. We all need the real Peace expression. She might be able to find the real Monument Builders.”

Montrose started to give a more complex argument in favor of Big Montrose attempting to download himself, perhaps into a well-isolated area of the ship, when the brain from the caricature of his face interrupted.

“Little brother, I am no longer in despair and never will be again. All this was arranged, put together by minds superior to ours. We can fight it, or we can bow and take our place in the big square dance and move through the figures and the turns and the kicks, even if we cannot see what the pattern looks like from a bird’s-eye view. I am not going to be dead, not really. What will happen to me is more like what happens to Schrödinger’s cat: I will exist as unrealized probability waves of unlocalized temporal identity. I am still connected with you, and with any other copies of me, just like Blackie was connected with Jupiter. It is not a secret of the universe that I understand, nor Ain, nor Hyades, nor M3—but someone understands it. Somewhere, beneath all the layers of lies that litter this rotten universe, there is a real Monument Builder who put out a real message of real truth and real peace—a message the real Rania could see.

“And, as for me, I would like to embrace Rania myself. I miss her terribly. I miss her more than you now know, but if you ever get to the Virtue level of intellect, larger than any Gas Giant Brain, you will understand me. But I have figured out something I should have seen long ago, something old Mom told me once, but I did not listen. Remember her picture she kept of Dad, the picture she’d never let us talk to?”

“Yeah. Because of his hick accent. Which I ended up borrowing from Dad’s folks anyway. Uncle Zephaniah told me how to say ain’t. My favorite word from that day to this.”

“Ain’t ain’t not your favorite word.”

“’Tis so!”

“Ain’t not!”

“’Tis! Pox you!”

“Pox is your favorite word. Anyway, this is good-bye. Mom kept the picture because she loved Dad’s dream to see us make something of ourselves more than she loved you being able to hear his voice. Don’t you think that hurt her? Cut her something ferocious deep in her heart to keep her little boys not hearing their daddy’s voice in the audio strip? She knew he’d be happier if it were this way. Dead or not, didn’t matter. She still did what would make him happy. She lived for his happiness, not her own. And I reckon I inherited that from her. Thanks, Mom.”

The fairy face began to dissolve, but the voice lingered. “Whether I am alive or dead does not matter, as long as Rania is happy. If you get to her, and you save her, and she is with you, she will be happy. And when all time ends in a singularity, and all parallel lines meet, maybe, just maybe, the cloud of probability where this version of me is floating will meet up with you, become real, and kiss her once again. The universe is a strange place.”

Montrose shouted, “Wait! First tell us—”

But now the voice was high and thin and regal. It was Twinklewink again. “I have lost signal from the ringworld.”

4. Unworthy to Receive

Montrose splashed out of the pool, wincing, as all his wounds were not entirely healed as yet, and stepped over and put his nose against the transparent hull, staring out at the turning ringworld with the blue planet at its center. The clouds and crowds of glassy stained-glass plates of the Dyson sphere were moving, growing thinner, opening the spot directly opposite the ringworld so that more and more light poured out.

Montrose realized with a sinking sensation of awe that each ray of sunlight must contain quanta of information. Even the light particles of Vanderlinden 133 were part of one coherent mental system. And this was not the largest nor most central star of the Praesepe Cluster.

The fairy voice said, “The Cahetel entity is requesting that you receive an embassy from the Praesepe Domination. This requires that I devote more memory space to receiving and compiling the intermediary than I can do without a substantial breech of security protocol.”

Montrose said, “Tell them to bite me. Anything they want to say, they can say over radio.”

Twinklewink said, “Not so. The radiation you observe striking the ringworld is only the visible part of the communication spectrum being used, of which Cahetel can translate and reflect to us only the least part. Merely to receive such a broadcast would entail more energy than the molecular bonds of the materials of this ship could withstand.”

Del Azarchel said dourly, “The voice of the gods would kill us, and the sight burn us to ashes like Semele. Come now! What do you fear? If Praesepe wished us dead, we would have been swatted like flies. Flies? No, like microbes. Let the monsters talk to us!” But he made haste to splash his way out of the pond, making a long and high leap in the lesser gravity, for he knew that the fluid was part of the ship’s brain.

Twinklewink said, “I will be forced into standby mode, due to lack of available resources. Praesepe’s emissary will have considerable latitude in forming its communication platform. Life support will also be placed on standby. You must enter biosuspension of any nonessential organs, and switch to your nonbiological neural systems for the duration of the conversation. The system will be four tiered, with a node here, one at Cahetel, one at the major agora of the Vanderlinden 133 Dyson sphere, and one at the trail of Gas Giant Brains occupying the volume between the stars 39 Cancri and HD 73730. The onboard emissary will share your frame of reference; the emissary possessing Cahetel involves a five-second delay; the interior layers of the Dyson sphere involve between as four and twenty-one minutes, depending on where the information is stored. Twenty-two years is the absolute minimal time for a minimal response to any question elevated to the Praesepe local stars for resolution. Questions requiring responses from the extended mind structure of the outer stars will involve ten times that duration. You may wish to adjust your perception of the local passage of time accordingly.”