Montrose raised the cup to his lips, and paused without tasting it. “You old dog! Did you say you had a fiancée?”
Del Azarchel looked at once proud and shy, like a man who wants to boast, but dares not. “You mentioned how much a ladies’ man I was in my wasted youth—in hindsight, I cannot tell you how I regret that. I wish I had never touched another woman, never looked at any other, so that I could be all for her! If she wanted it, I would give her the world!”
Montrose grinned, ignoring the drink in his hand. “Who is she?”
“Prince Ranier’s daughter, Rania.”
“Eh? Did he have a kid before he left? But that was a hundred fifty years ago!”
“She spent a good deal of time in suspended animation. And I must tell you, all the others who sued for her hand, D’Aragó, de Ulloa, and i illa d’Or—everyone onboard was in love with her—heh, I suppose it is easy to be head over heels in zero gee!—but no one else won her.” A boyish glee, like inner fire, burned in him, and Montrose saw the young man he remembered from what to him was merely a yesterday ago, now like a ghost possessing the silver-haired cripple he saw today.
“What? Is the Hermetic still aloft? Are you planning another expedition? Sign me up!”
“No further human expeditions are planned.”
“We’ll have to change that!”
“Unlikely. In any case, the Hermetic is kept in-system, for maintenance of our power.”
“Energy power or political power?”
“The two are linked. Contraterrene cannot be allowed on Earth or near it: even the inner system is too crowded with terrene-matter particles for safety. The Hermetic alone has the magnetic-field tools needed to herd the antimatter packets into transplutonian orbits, and the drive to reach the outer system.”
“What about building another ship, then? Ain’t you got the riches?”
“More than enough! The Bellerophon was christened and towed to launch orbit five years ago. She merely awaits her crew.”
“Wait—but you said…”
“I cannot risk a human crew. Need I remind you of the losses aboard the Hermetic? Half the greatest scientists and mathematicians of our generation died on that ship, setting back the cause of human progress by a century. No! Starfaring is inhumane, and therefore meant for inhumans.”
Montrose almost dropped the cup he held. “Plague and pox! You mean the crew will be—!”
“Crew and captain at once. You are standing inside him.”
“Pox!”
“The Bellerophon saves a great deal of mass with no need for life support. It is the next generation of starship, designed to hold only the next generation of intelligence.”
“The crew is just you. Your emulation here.”
Del Azarchel gave a nonchalant nod of the head. “You see how it saves of training time and cost? I am already skilled as a ship’s pilot, and familiar with the nuances of star-mining, and capable of investigating the Monument when the ship reaches V 886 Centauri.”
“What happens to the Hermetic?”
Del Azarchel shook his head ruefully. “Never fall for a woman smarter than yourself! She forced me to re-outfit it, stem to stern, even though we both know that ship will never sail again. But popular opinion—argh! Never mind. Even the Master of the World is a servant after all to those he rules. I had to prepare the Hermetic for starflight in order to get the Concordat to cooperate with constructing the Bellerophon: starships are legally equivalent to theater nonconventional weapons. You see, the political situation—ah, never mind. Let’s just say she can beat me at chess and bluff me at poker. Still! I have two starships now, with sails a hundred miles wide!”
“Tell me of this gal. Euchered you something dreadful, did she? Hell, I like her just hearing of it! And everyone on the ship was a-courting of her?”
“Oh, indeed! To see her you would understand. Like the ocean, she is deep and mysterious and terrible, and yet, how she shines! A goddess; a step above the human race! She is everything I have dreamed—she is the golden future I seek—smarter, wiser, and makes every other woman look like a foolish child. They all seem so clumsy compared to her. The swan is in her footstep, music in the turn of her head. And at the same time, she is so lighthearted, gay, and free in her spirit—like fire, like sunlight, like starlight—and she knows things, strange things, no one else can divine.”
“She must love you, eh, Blackie?”
“To possess her will be my crowning accomplishment. It will quiet the multitudes, and lend the final sanction of perfection to my reign.”
Menelaus was not sure what to make of that comment. So he shrugged and said, “How did this old lady get aboard the ship?”
“What old lady?”
“Your fiancée! Rain-on-you, or whatever her name is.”
“Rania. Princess Rania of Monaco. But before we speak, let us toast!”
The fluid was hot in Montrose’s mouth, and he felt it draw a line of burning down into his stomach.
“Yee-ow! What is that stuff?—Hey. How come you ain’t drinking with me…?”
“I am afraid the effect on me would not be fruitful.”
Montrose opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment, he felt a lightheaded sensation, as if his skull were filled with helium. Every object looked both small and sharp in his vision, far away but crisply defined.
Del Azarchel pointed. “Look at the divarication problem again. I need you to save my child.” Montrose noticed the pattern of veins and bones in Del Azarchel’s thin hand, and realized that the biochemical structures involved were binary. That was not his real hand: He could define the pattern of liver spots and skin irregularities against a theoretical formula and see the deviations.
He was fascinated by the image of Del Azarchel’s finger pointing. Several levels of meaning occurred to him, but he decided on the simplest, and turned his head and focused his eyes (first his right eye, then his left, operating each tiny eye muscle separately, according to a new method of nerve impulse transmission he only that second recognized how to do) and saw the curving writing system of the aliens, the Monument notations, covering the walls.
Then …
3. Number Swarm
At first, there were only patterns; not even numbers, just the abstractions of the relationships, which danced and roared and stormed like a tornado. Here a swarm of fields, each expressing a different function, rotated and spun and fit together. When the fits were harmonious, pleasure, and where they jarred against each other, disgust.
But where was it? Like a babe that cannot distinguish between itself, its hand, and the beam of light falling on its crib toward which it reaches its hand, the mind could not at first draw the distinction between the abstractions whirling in the imagination, and the much more prosaic symbols flickering in the air around. No, not in the air. The symbols were in the walls, shining from library cloth, stream upon stream and window upon window, fields as orderly as soldiers marching, fractals as wild as the sea-wave as it crashed.
Not numbers; Monument notations mixed with Greek letters and Arabic numerals. At this point he became aware that the numbers were not the abstractions they represented. What he was seeing in his mind was only partly adumbrated by the streaming numbers. Then he became aware that he was aware. Not a mind only, a human. Menelaus Illation Montrose. He had just been … Just been … Talking with Del Azarchel. Or … What had he been doing?
A meaning spoke out of number stream. Do not stop! Complete the function!
It was not a voice. The notation itself formed a pattern that held an innate packet of meaning. For a moment he could simply see it, as if it were text, because the symbols followed the same pattern and ratio as thought itself. Then, like a bubble popping, it was gone. Like trying to recall a dream on waking, he could only snatch at a fragment: