“Now you’re blushing.”
“I don’t blush. I glow. And you cannot see me.”
“Pox. I don’t need to see. I’m your man.”
“Not just my man, my crewman.”
“Pox on that! I wear the pants in this family.”
“You are not wearing pants now.”
“I am still chief. You squaw. Got it?”
“Yes, milord, my husband, and my master. What are your orders?”
“I order you to tell me what you want me to do. It ain’t like I ain’t wrapped around that wee little finger of yours.”
“For my part, I swore to love, honor, and obey. I will honor you now. You alone can I trust with what I discovered.” And she pressed the square into his hands.
It was an antique desk pad, scarred and battered with use, and covered with cheery little pictures of flowers and butterfly-winged fairies. There was also in brass an emblem of a youth with winged sandals and winged cap, snake-twined rod in hand, one toe on a globe, one hand on a star: the symbol of the Joint Hispanosphere-Indosphere Hermetic Expedition.
She tapped the surface of the pad. A crowned and twinkling fairy-sorceress appeared in the glass, displayed a list of menu choices, one of which was Stinky Baby’s Monument Translation.
Montrose realized that this was her personal bookpad, the one she had aboard the ship as a little girl. “Who is Stinky Baby?”
“You.”
“What!”
“My name for you back on my ship. You were the only man I had ever seen who was not gray and wrinkled, and you slept in your coffin for months and years, and that fit the definition I read in the dictionary for a baby. Besides, you wore a diaper, because you did not know how to use a toilet bag. How was I to know what you were?”
“Stinky?”
“The diaper had to be reused.”
She touched the pad again. The bookpad screen had a fairy figure dancing across the surface, waving a wand dripping sparks, and in her wake an image formed of the labyrinth of alien mathematical codes from the Iota and Lambda segments. Lambda was a reprise of the political economic calculus of the Iota Segment, but drawn out in more detail. In floating windows in the margins were translations into the simplified Monument Notation, and then into the Human-Monument Pidgin.
She said, “The Monument Builders have a mathematical expression in the Iota Segment to define the degree of mutuality extended to each measured rank of lesser beings. We are a form of life which might prove useful to their purposes, in a marginal way, even as dogs do tasks for shepherds.”
“Wolves, you mean. We’ll fight and die first.”
“While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution.”
“You got a better one?”
“Yes, for now is the hour of my awakening. I am here to do what I was meant to do. You, my husband, have made me whole.”
She was speaking in a calm, almost eerie voice, but then suddenly her voice broke into sobs and she was in his arms, weeping, rubbing her tears against his chest.
“Hey! What’s—what’s wrong? Supermen don’t cry!” He held her one-handed, the bookpad in the other. The light from the pad screen fell across her buttocks and legs.
“Tears of joy, of joy unknown to lesser men, they do,” she said, sniffing and hiccupping as she laughed. “I know who I am! At long last!”
“Uh. Okay. Hit me. Who are you?”
“The redeemer. I will vindicate the human race.”
“Uh. Okay. What the hell does that mean?”
Rania wiped her nose on her elbow and spoke to the pad. “Twinklewink! Bring up file code last.” The floating fairy on the screen overlaid the Monument lines with a second and third layer of hieroglyphs.
To him she said, “You have read as far as the Iota and Kappa segments, which gives their equations of political calculus. What you call the Cold Equations.”
He nodded. “Basically, the stars are so far apart it ain’t worth no one’s time and effort to cross the abyss, unless they have a planet to conquer and loot on the other side.”
“That applies only when the power imbalance is vertical. In general game theory, a situation of mutual benefit and expected mutual benefit is best. Both parties in the transaction must remain players in the game long enough for a move and a response to be completed. There is a natural marriage of interests between any two intelligent species—if their intelligence is roughly the same, their resources, their ability to benefit each other.”
She talked to the pad. The little fairy cursor brought up more screens.
More Monument hieroglyphs appeared on the screen, in a column with the pidgin translation. It was farther than Montrose had ever read; farther than (as best he knew) Del Azarchel had ever read.
Rania said, “Here is a vector sum in the time-relation I call the Concubine Vector. It is when the natural marriage of interests is between unequal partners. The Concubine Vector defines how much abuse and exploitation the inferior partner can be expected to suffer. The mathematics are quite elegant, even if the idea is horrid. One can define precisely, for example, how much shoplifting a shop can tolerate before losing either profit or customers, or how much criminal activity a town should stand before they create a police force, and how much police corruption to endure before creating checks on police power. And so on.”
“So what does the Concubine Vector say?”
“It does not say that the human race will be slaves forever to the machines of Hyades.”
“Good!”
“Only for many tens of millennia.”
“No good.”
“It is, strictly speaking, indentured servitude, not slavery outright, since the laws defined by the Cold Equations require they manumit the race as soon as we have paid back value equal to what it took to conquer us, plus a reasonable profit, of course.”
“Bugger them. They got no right to conquer us and make us pay for it. That’s just stupid. And why are they doing this? And why are they bragging about it? Why post their plans up on this Monument for all and sundry to see?”
“Because the Cold Equations require mutual communication for the natural marriage of interests to work, even within this ‘Concubine Vector’ of unilateral exploitation. The math itself shows things go more badly for both conqueror and conquered if both sides do not know exactly the rules and limits of the other.”
“Okay. So why were you crying with joy?”
“Because I can redeem us. Pay the price they ask. Isn’t it clear?”
“As mud at midnight, it is.”
She tapped two of the little lines of alien math, so that the image rotated, and slid over to another side of the Monument segment, and overlapped a different group of Celtic knots. The negative spaces formed glyphs in the same Monument notation.
“I am called away: and you, if you will come.”
“God himself could not stop me. Away to where?”
“Can’t you read it?” She seemed surprised.
“Not at a glance, when I’m sleep-fogged. What’s it say?”
“It defines our destination.”
In his imagination, he turned the Monument hieroglyphs into an emulation code that he ran in the back of his mind and formatted the results as a visual image: the mighty spiral of the galaxy, arms of billions of stars reaching through clouds and streamers of nebulae, through flocks of frozen planets, rivers of interstellar asteroids, and belts of dark matter, million-year-old storms of energy, gravity stress-points, and all the other minutia the Monument Builders tracked.
Overlaid was a spiderweb of lines representing divarication and information cascade functions, representing political lines of control.
“Do you see it?” she asked.
“I see something interesting. The Hyades Domination is just a collaboration of slave races themselves. They are janissaries; fighting slaves. They belong to a higher power.”