In contrast, it was with a look of awe that Menelaus examined the high-energy image. He studied it with increasing excitement for long moments before he spoke. “There is no gamma ray count registered. That means the forty percent of pions created during total conversion which should be neutral somehow ain’t neutral. I’d say it’s impossible, but do you know what that means? The main problem with matter–antimatter conversion is that most of your mass is lost and wasted in dark matter like pi mesons. She has some method of charging them, so the axial electromagnetic field lines can grab them, focus them into the thrust before they decay into muons. She did it somehow, but I don’t know how. She did the impossible!”
He started to laugh with joy, but the meaning of the image suddenly struck him, and the laughter choked in his throat.
“Brother Roger, is this a mistake? The spectrographic reading along the bottom—someone must have flipped the plate into the camera backwards, or—or—”
“No, Doctor,” said the Jesuit, his face pale. “The image is red-shifted, not blue-shifted.”
“She is not heading toward the Earth. She is heading away. Where is she going? Never mind! I know! Damn my balls and eyeballs! She’s leaving! She’s not coming back for me!”
In a rage he raised the photographic plate and smashed it to pieces. He knotted his fists into the hair of his head to keep himself from smashing other things, and he tried to gather so much hair in his hands that he could not pull it out. His hands only indifferently obeyed his commands, so there was considerable yanking on his scalp, and it brought tears to his eyes. More tears.
Bile stung the back of his throat. Menelaus finally parked his head between his knees, waiting to see if he would throw up.
“She even told me. We talked about it!”
“Doctor? Where is she going? To the Hyades? It is one hundred and fifty-one light-years away. She could return in three hundred years or so, which is not an impossible time for a hibernating man to outwait.”
“Not the Hyades.”
“What else is out there?”
Montrose squeezed his eyes shut, wondering if he could induce a brain aneurysm in himself just by sheer anger and willpower. “M3.”
“Where?”
“The Messier Object Three.” Menelaus spoke the words with deliberate care. “It is a galactic cluster, a microgalaxy, hanging almost directly above the disk of the Milky Way, like a wee little bluebottle fly thinking about landing on a pie plate. It’s not some piss-ass little stellar cluster, like Hyades, oh no. Hyades is a few hundred stars, maybe eight hundred. M3 contains half a million to a million suns. M3 also contains an entity, a collection of races or a collection of machines, a power of some sort, a far-posthuman intelligence she labeled the Absolute Authority. That’s what their glyph in the Monument means: their word for themselves is a game theory expression for a player whose moves expand infinitely to all cell matrices and determine all outcomes. It is the boss of Praesepe Cluster, which is five hundred and fifty light-years away; and Praesepe is the boss of Hyades. So M3 is the boss of their boss. Their chain of command is all written out in the Monument. She is going to the top. City Hall. The Front Office. The King. The Judgment Seat.”
“Why go there?”
The words fell from the mouth of Montrose like pebbles of lead. “Vindication. She is going to vindicate the human race.”
“What?”
“If she goes and comes back, it proves that the human race is a starfaring race. It proves we can live long enough and think far enough into the future to carry out interstellar trade and to be governed by interstellar laws. Starfarers got to think long-term, and be greedy enough to wait for a ten-thousand-year payoff, in the case of trade agreements; Godfearing enough to be adverse to ten-thousand-year delayed vengeance. Only polities that care a damn sight more than human beings have been known to care about their way-off way-way-off descendents need apply.”
“And if mankind is tested and proved, and found to be starfarers?”
“It makes us equals. Our servitude to Hyades is abolished. We’re free and debt-free. But Rania has to come back, and there has to be a deceleration laser here ready to receive her, and the people of that generation and aeon, they got to know who she is, recognize her rights, all that good stuff.
“If we forget her,” Montrose continued, “then the Earth fails the test, and we are not smart enough and not long-term enough to deal with the distances star-travel requires.
“So that is my job.” Montrose concluded, “You gotta admit, I am perfectly suited. No one is as goddam stubborn as me. And I am not going to forget her or let the world forget.”
Brother Roger said, “Then your war with Exarchel is over! Because when she returns, and proves we are a starfaring race, the Hyades will recall their world armada, surely, will they not?”
“Oh, I did not mention the distance,” said Menelaus with a groan, smiling a weak smile, crinkling his tearstained cheeks. “I thought you, being an astronomer—”
“I don’t have the Messier catalog memorized, Doctor.”
“It is outside the damn galaxy. M3 is roughly thirty-three thousand nine hundred light-years away. The round-trip at near-lightspeed is over sixty-seven thousand years. She will be back, assuming no delays and no nonsense, by A.D. 70,800. You got that figure in your mind? If you counted to a trillion, and counted one number a second, and you did it twelve hours a day, taking half the day off for eating and sleeping, that is roughly the time involved.”
Brother Roger blinked owlishly. “It is a hard number to imagine, Doctor,” he said slowly.
“Put it in the past instead of the future. That’ll give you a notion of the scale. In order for today to be the day when my wife returned from the gulfs beyond the galaxy, she would have had to have departed from Earth back in the year 60,000 B.C.—about when Neanderthals still walked the Earth. Leaf-point stone tools and the dugout canoe were both new inventions.”
“But the Hyades world armada arrives in A.D. 11,000, does it not? Won’t her actions, the vindication, be far, far too late?”
Menelaus answered, “We have to battle the Hegemony, and stay free all that time, until she comes. And with no antimatter star to mine no more. No power for a new civilization. No nothing. We have to endure. Endure until…”
Montrose shook his head, his sorrow, for a moment, swallowed up in wonder.
“She blasted the damn star out of orbit, and she is accelerating in a right line, straight up out of the plane of the galactic disk, to a little cluster of stars, half a million or so, that hangs like an island in the middle of intergalactic nothingness.”
Brother Roger was silent.
Montrose said, “My war with Del Azarchel is just starting. My war with entropy is just starting. It will be the longest war in history. It will be longer than history. If I lose, the human race remains the slaves of the Hyades Hegemony forever and ever, amen.”
“And if you win, we are free?”
“Sodomize that. What do I care what some big-headed big-arsed post-transhuman half-machine bug-faced thing in the Year Zillion is free or slave? If I win, I get my wife back.” Montrose stood up. “I need a breath of fresh air. Which we cannot get unless you descend thirty miles.”
4. The Sign
Brother Roger Juliac said, “I can take you to the observation platform, where at least you can look out and see the stars.”
Menelaus looked down mournfully at the fragments of the photographic plate he’d smashed. “Sorry about that. I should not have lost my temper.”
“We all lose our temper sometimes.”
“And we all say sorry sometimes when we do! One of my relations, Thucydides, you call him Sixtus the Sixth, which is a dumb name if you ask me, imposed a penalty on me, a punishment. He said I had to stay happy. To wait in joyful hope for her return. That means I cannot give up, cannot give in to despair, can’t let it get to me. I gotta just soldier on.”
Brother Roger led him down a companionway and
a set of narrow metal stairs to a bubble of transparent metal hanging like a swallow’s nest precariously from the side of the great cylindrical balloon. The earth below was lined with a blue shadow in the distance, where the sunlight, like a great curving line, still glinted over the retreating sunset. Directly underfoot, all was dark. The wonder of city lights agleam at night, which had for so many years been the joy of astronauts and high flying pilots, was no more. Instead, there were drifting lights like fireflies where flotillas of aeroscaphes were gathered, and here and there, a strange green glint from under the sea, the sign of some activity from the Cetaceans.
Montrose turned. In the east, the moon was risen, pale as a skull. He gave off a gasp of horror and grabbed Brother Roger by the arm. “What the hell is that!?”
For the face of the moon was painted with the shadow of a hand.
The wrist was near Tycho crater, and the vast palm, complete with curving lifeline, smothered the Sea of Tranquillity and the Sea of Serenity. The gray white thumb stretched across the Ocean of Storms toward the lava crater of Grimaldi, the darkest area of the moon. The fingers were drawn up toward the Mare Frigoris, Sea of Cold, and were painted with solid ashy white. The hand was not in proper proportion, for the fingers were too long and thin. The curve of the moon bent the fingers. The fingertips at the lunar north pole must have been nine hundred miles farther from the Earth than the palm near the lunar equator, but since the moon looked like a disk to the human eye, this produced the odd illusion that the vast hand was curling its fingers toward the viewer. A thin pale hand with a black palm seemed as if ready to reach down from heaven.
“It first appeared when the cities were deserted,” said Brother Roger. “It grew steadily over seventy days, starting with the wrist near Tycho crater. There was a launch site in Tycho that sent skywriting rockets by the thousands over the lunar landscape, with payloads of phosphorescent dust, which of course fell straight to the lunar surface, where it remains and shall remain forever, with no wind to disturb it and no water to wash it away. When the moon is dark, the hand is still visible. No one knows what it means.”
“You cannot send a ship?”
“There is no space program. Even the Giants cannot repair their orbital mirrors if a part wears out.”
“You wakie people, you currents, were supposed to be building me a starship.…”
“The Emancipation was stolen and the orbital drydock de-orbited and burnt up in the atmosphere.”
“Stolen? You cannot steal things in space.”
“Well, Doctor, we know exactly where she is, we merely cannot reach her. The vessel was not complete, but sails and frame were sufficient to make lunar orbit. During the First Space Age, several attempts to establish moon bases in ex-volcanic tubes. When the Jihad brought an end to all that, it was too expensive to ship the equipment back down to Earth. The pirates may have restored one of the bases to life-support operations and be occupying it. We don’t know who their leader is, or why they did it.”
“It is Del Azarchel. He did it to get some elbow room.”
“How do you know?”
“First, Blackie likes to do things in style, and this fits him. Second, that handprint on the moon is not just any old hand.”
“What is it?”
“A duelist gauntlet. The black-palm glove. Del Azarchel did not know where on the Earth I was. So he held up his palm large enough that I had to see it. You hold up your fingers like that when you are ready to exchange fire.”
“He marred the face of the moon forever, merely to hurl down a gauntlet to you, Doctor?”
“Ah. You weren’t calling me that for a few moments, there. Whatsa matter? You got afraid of me again, all of a sudden, Padre?”
“Very much so, Doctor.”
“Why? I’m the same damn fellow as I was a minute ago.”
“But your foes have grown strangely larger in my eyes, Doctor.”
2
The Sea of Cunning
A.D. 2540
1. The Presence Chamber
The Master of the World was in exile.
Dawn had been a week ago, so the sun was nearing noon. Untwinkling stars were in theory visible in the deathly black sky, but the human eye could not adjust to both extremes at once. Overhead was merely an abyssal dark that caused no vertigo, because there was nothing seen in it. There was no Earth to loom in the sky, nor would there ever be, for this was the Moon’s far side, which faced forever away from the world of men.
The Sea of Cunning, Mare Ingenii, was a cracked basin of obsidian crossed with fissures like whip scars, filling a crater sixty miles wide, with inkblots of dark lava spilling east and west. Here was a wasteland where no living thing had ever grown, no note of any sound had ever been heard and no grain of sand had ever been stirred by any gasp of wind. Crater walls as white and pockmarked as the corpses of lepers blazed in the distance, turned to intolerable fire by the undimmed sun. The black slag of primordial lava flows formed a wrinkled carpet. The ground was shot and blistered, pocked and dinted by eons of impacts as if by mortar and machine gun fire.
Like a black coin dropped on the floor of a long-dead furnace white with ash was the presence chamber of the Master of the World: a circle thirty yards in diameter. A dome so pure and featureless so as to be invisible embraced the chamber at the rim, so that it seemed one could step without barrier from the dead world into the bubble of life. From within, the inhuman silence of the vacuum seemed to press like a weight upon the fragile dome, a silence that could be felt in one’s bone marrow.
Midmost in the chamber was an immense table of black metal shaped like a broken circle, or a tossed horseshoe. The floor plates under that table were tuned to black, but able, upon command, to put the images of all the Earth that he once ruled below the feet of Ximen del Azarchel, or spin out the mathematical trees and twigs of scenarios of predictive statistics, that he might see by what means he should come to rule Earth once again.
The illusion of equality a nearly round table might create was broken, for looming between the open horseshoe ends was a dais. At one time, the round table had been whole, but he had commanded artisans to cut away the length of table where once had sat those of his order who dared opposed his elevation from first among equals to master.
Upon the elevated dais was a judgment seat of ivory hammered over with fine gold, set on a massive base and wide, adorned by spiral narwhale tusks that gleamed like the horns of mythic unicorns and reared like spears. The high and arching backrest was adorned with the dark, triangular visage of a bull in rage.
In the deadly brightness of a sun undimmed by atmosphere, the gilded and argent chair blazed like a mirror in the desert, a striking contrast with the dark-garbed figure seated between the narwhale horns: a bright flame with a black heart.
The throne sat foursquare, and before the footstool descended six steps broad and shallow. Twelve life-sized lions hewn of black marble stood rampant in pairs, one to either side of each step, frozen in midlunge. Scribed into the surface of each stair and set with star-sapphires, a different creature or emblem representing a figure of the zodiac cowered beneath the paw of each of the twelve black lions: the throne almost seemed a chariot trampling the constellations underfoot.
The senior of the landing party of the Hermetic expedition, the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel, called Ximen the Black, sat alone in state atop the only throne ever to exist upon the gray and lifeless globe that formed the sole remnant and remainder of his reign.
It did not seem arrogance to Del Azarchel to make his seat to match the throne of Solomon described in the Book of Kings, for he deemed himself, with his multiply augmented mind, wiser than any ancient monarch, prophet, poet, or magician. Nor did the Djinn that ancient sorcerer-king was said to have sealed in brass jars and bent to his command seem any less fearsome and terrible than Exarchel, the mind housed in the amber pillars that arose to either side of the judgment seat. Traces of fluorine hidden in each rod-logic macromolecule gave the p
illars a lambent fulvous hue, as if they were hewn of transparent gold.
Del Azarchel wore the dark and silken garment of a starfarer, and needed no other sign of royalty, save only for the dark metal circlet atop his air cowl but beneath his scholar’s hood.
This was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a band of gold and emerald segments jointed with hinges and set with precious stones in the form of crosses and flowers. Within the band was a narrow circle of iron, if legend spoke true, beaten out of one of the nails taken from the True Cross. It was the most ancient insigne of royalty surviving Christendom, and held its most precious relict, and had been kept, until late, in the Cathedral of Monza in Milan. A delta of scar tissue running upward from the corner of his right eye to beneath his cowl was a memento of an assassination attempt, and surely made the wearing of that crown painful in his brow, even under the elfin gravity of the moon. Painful or no, he did not set the crown aside.
Within the triangle of the mouth of his hood, the glint of his white teeth between dark mustachios and goatee could be glimpsed, the drops of cold fire caught in the diamonds of his iron crown, and the strange light from no-longer-human eyes.
2. The Hermeticists
He raised a hand gloved in what seemed black silk. Although there seemed to be none within the chamber to see that signal, nonetheless, upon that gesture, five of his fellow Hermeticists rose from three circular iris-hatches in the floor, drifting upward with the eerie grace only lunar gravity allowed.
The men did not quite land, nor quite walk, but moved toes against the dark deck with ballet smoothness. Their black garments rippled like silk, and silvery antiradiation mantles fluttered like capes as they passed.
All men in the wide chamber wore similar bodies. The Hermeticists in their lunar-adaptive forms were tall and emaciated, lacking in water weight, with dry cracks at lips and nostrils. Even the heaviest of them had a sunken, skull-like cast to his face, a strange leaden highlight to his skin, a side effect of the special nanomachinery lining their bones and filling their bone marrow to prevent microgravity decay. Their eyes were as mirror-shining as the eyes of a cat, or filmy as the eyes of a sea beast, for growing additional microorganisms meant to shield their eyes from accidental radiation exposure turned out, unexpectedly, to be less cumbersome than polarized faceplates or dark goggles.