“That’s all?”
“All?” Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “It was so revolutionary that radio messages from Earth accused us of fraud! No expert believed it! This notation is the Philosophical Language, a universal grammar, that Leibniz and others so long ago for so long sought. In theory, any language system, any method of encoding meaning, speech, or writing, or flashes of a heliograph, any method, including human brainwaves or genetically determined behaviors, can be translated into any other! In theory, a complex enough expression could encompass all the variables of human society.”
“But the Monument did not contain an instruction book on how to build a faster-than-light drive?”
Del Azarchel looked impatient. “Oh, yes, we have all that. But it requires a blue fairy riding the back of a unicorn on the thirty-first day of February to make it work.”
“Oh, Goedel is wrong, but Einstein is gospel! And you’re poking fun of me for that. What about the aliens? Did the Monument give us a map, tell us where they hail from? Any contact with them yet? We sell them Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars or anything? Can I see one?”
“If you live long enough.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The Monument provided us a clue. Astronomers studying the open cluster in Hyades, a mere one hundred fifty lightyears away, hypothesize that the high helium-carbon content of those stars is due to large-scale engineering, not to natural effects. Macroscale engineering. There may be an intelligence of some description within hailing distance. Well, that is to say, the descendants ten generations after the present generation would hear the response to a hail we send out.”
“Three hundred years between call and reply, huh?”
“Plus turnaround time, yes. Time to make the decision to respond, gather the money, gather the will.”
“You reckon they have money?”
“They must have some means of economizing their expenditures. No matter what system of prioritizing benefits and expenses they use, sending a coherent beam of radio across one hundred fifty lightyears costs energy.”
The magnitude of time made the idea of contact absurd: as if Queen Victoria might hear the replies to messages sent out by Queen Elizabeth.
“This Hyades Cluster: they the ones who built the Monument?”
“Unknown. At the moment we don’t know if ‘they’ are really there.”
“So no voluptuous green-skinned spacewomen in silvery space-bikinis?” Montrose was thinking wryly that his childhood comics had been wrong about everything.
Del Azarchel looked amused. He said, “In that respect, the world is much as you left it. But in others, ah! You are wrong, I tell you, to mock this era. You have much to see! We may not have flying cars, but we have built an evacuated underground rail system which follows hypoclyoid curves deep through the molten mantle of Earth, allowing us to fling bullet-carriages, accelerated by induction coil guns, from continent to continent faster than even military jets can fly. It is amazing the public works projects one can perform if your energy budget is practically unlimited. We have melted Antarctic ice, opening vast tracts on that continent to cultivation, and used the water to turn the Gobi Desert green, and clothe the interior of Australia with fruit trees. Mega-evaporation, moving moisture, moving clouds, gathering sunlight, deflecting sunlight: everything that is technically possible is now technically feasible, because we have power enough.”
“Energy power or political power?”
“Both! We want for nothing. And, yes, the Hermetic Conclave has some advantages that previous rulers never enjoyed, thanks to the study of the Eta Segment, it is true. We can calculate some social trends to a nicety. The science is called Cliometry. You deserve credit for that. Not to mention that the Princess seems to have an analytical method, or a divine gift … well, no matter. The power is in our palm. The treasure trove is ours. You have the key. We need but turn the lock and listen as it all clicks into place.”
“What clicks into place?”
“The future! Don’t you recall what we stayed up all night discussing, that last night on Earth, before the liftoff? It has been years of time for me, and I recall it. It has been days only for you. Have you forgotten?”
“Talked about girls, as I recollect. All the pretty girls you knew were going to be long dead while we slumbered. You had quite the list, Blackie. We talked about leaving Earth forever…”
“And about returning in triumph with the lore of the universe! We talked of the future!”
“So why haven’t y’all translated more of the Monument while I was out?”
“Because the Monument was not meant for us. Man is a microscopic biological infestation clinging to the dry surface irregularities of the crust-folds of one small iron-cored rocky planet circling a medium-sized yellow star in the outskirts of the galaxy. We are like simple-minded monkeys who found an encyclopedia one savant wrote down for another. It was meant to be read by something far more intelligent than man.”
“You must have them by now.”
“Who?”
“Posthumans. Augmented Intellects. Odd Johns. Nexts. People who did right what I did wrong to my brain. What research in intelligence augmentation was done while I was in cold storage?”
“Almost none.”
Montrose could not express his disgust: He merely made a noise halfway between a groan and the noise you make to clear your throat before you spit.
Del Azarchel spread his hands. “Experimentation on human subjects was illegal in the year we sailed, remember? And your example discouraged further investigation.”
“Example? One hundred and fifty years! In that amount of time, we went from Ben Franklin pulling electricity down from the sky, to the Wright Brothers putting a man up into it! You are telling me one bad experiment set back the whole globe for two centuries? I don’t believe it!”
“Ah, but the New World between the day of Benjamin Franklin and the day of the Brothers Wright suffered no tyrannies, plagues, or famines, and their small wars were fought only with gunpowder, not lingering germs. Anglo-American laws and customs were especially friendly to innovators and inventors. Whereas Earth, while we were gone, was not so friendly. First it was overpopulated, and then it was underpopulated, ruled alternately by Xi Mandarins from the Peking, or by Bio-Warlords from Pretoria.”
Montrose followed his gaze to where Del Azarchel was staring thoughtfully at a painting of skeletal buildings toppling in the red shadows of a mushroom cloud.
“Well,” he muttered, “they should have been following up on my work, instead of messing around.”
“Now we can set things right.”
“We, meaning the human race?”
“We, meaning you and I. Your method, your Prometheus Formula, is the only technique, even after a century, that shows promise of evolving us to the intellectual plateau needed to unriddle the Monument. But your method proved too dangerous to use on a live human subject—ah! But what about a ghost? An iron ghost? What about a marriage of my methods and yours?”
Montrose recalled that his work in ultra-long-term neurohibernation had won him a berth aboard the starship. But Del Azarchel’s work had been just as cruciaclass="underline" The ship’s brain had been based on Del Azarchel’s work in Automated Intelligence. At the time, there had been powerful political factions who had not wanted the Spaniard or the Texan aboard. They were the wrong kind of people; it sent the wrong kind of message. They were troublemakers. But Captain Grimaldi, a prince in more ways than one, had pulled them aboard. There were some natural overlaps to the two fields, but how did they apply here?
“I don’t get it,” said Montrose. “What are you driving at?”