“No.”
“We went to V 886 Centauri and back.”
“No. The expedition was a failure. Can’t you see that? We were attacked—attacked as if by pirates, when the Hermetic returned—by our own world. Our arrival overturned the customs and governments, which should, by rights, have been waiting to protect us, to assure us of our property, and to encourage others to dream of like ventures. Men are not starfarers yet.”
Menelaus noticed the implication: that it would be a social change, an evolution in laws and traditions, which would make the human race starfarers. But what nation, what institution, could last so long?
He said only: “And what do we have to do?”
“Mankind has to learn to plan ahead a thousand years or ten thousand, and carry out our plans. To be a starfaring race means to think in the long-term. Space is too vast, the stars are too far, for small or selfish calculation! No race can starfare that cannot keep its purposes fixed and unchanging over long years of time; nor join the rulers of the stars who cannot keep contracts faithfully across long lightyears of space. The short-term races cannot be partners in covenants or voices in the galactic conversation, only serfs: for they have not the attention span.”
Menelaus was silent, wondering, turning over the figures in his mind.
M3 was 33,900 lightyears away. If a man who did not need to eat or sleep started counting the second he saw a ship traveling lightspeed depart for M3, and that tireless man uttered one number every second of the day and night, he would count to a trillion before that number would pass. Including leap years, it would be 31,688 years, 269 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds. He would still have over 3 millenniums to count. That was the one-way trip. Even at the theoretical maximum of nigh-to-lightspeed, assuming no turn-around time, the soonest a verdict could return from M3 to Earth would be 67,800 years from now.
Sixty-seven thousand eight hundred years.
The figure was stunning. A.D. 70800. That is the earliest anyone on Earth would hear about the verdict. The Seven Hundred Ninth Century.
Montrose tried to think of a comparison. When did the Egyptians build the pyramids? No. That was roughly 2500 B.C.: less than a twelfth of the span of time being completed here. The amount of time to go and return from M3 was equal to from now to the middle of the Paleolithic, circa 60000 B.C. About when the first canoe was dug and arrowheads shaped into leaf points by flint napping were both still new-fangled things the old folk probably didn’t cotton to, but all the rage amoung the cave-boys.
“It is too damn far. Why not send a radio signal instead? Coherent light does not disperse or lose energy in a vacuum.”
“That would prove only that we are a signal-making race, not a starfaring race.”
He looked at the star-map notation again, revisualized it in another form. He was rather pleased with himself that he could picture more than a million discrete points, representing stars, and their relation to each other in time and space, in his eidetic memory. But he was also a little disappointed: he had been expecting a difference in the nature of his thought, not just in the speed and complexity.
Augmented intelligence seemed a small enough thing when compared with the terrifying grandeur of outer space. If anything, the greater sensitivity of his thoughts allowed him to truly understand the magnitude of what hitherto had been too astronomically huge to be meaningful. No, he could actually feel it, grasp it, and to know how microscopic a mote man’s world was in the void.
M3 was distant. It was farther away from Sol than the center of the galaxy was. If the galactic disk were laid out like a dinner plate, M3 would be like a dandelion puff floating almost directly above it. The Monument script gave figures (expressed in terms of the unit of the energy liberated from the fission of one hydrogen atom with an antihydrogen atom) for the power use of the civilization at M3, and the symbols hinted at some aspects of their technology.
Menelaus reminded himself that, in the language of astronomers, a star cluster was nothing like a globular cluster. Hyades and Praesepe were clusters: Hyades held perhaps four hundred stars, and in Praesepe, three hundred fifty were visible. Whereas a globular cluster was an immensity, typically holding half a million to a million stars. Globular clusters were scattered like flying sparks ranging far above and below the main disk of the galaxy. The zone where globular clusters were found occupied a sphere centered on the galactic core, composed of older stars of low metallic properties.
In a globular cluster, the stars were packed close. On average, one would be next to its neighbor no farther away than perhaps six times the radius of Neptune’s orbit, so the skies of any worlds in that crowded space would be densely filled with stars brighter than Venus at sunset, glowing clouds of light rather than scattered constellations. To the human eye, it would be a star dazzle too bright to stare at for long.
M3 had more variable stars than every other globular cluster in the galactic halo. The cluster included a large number of so-called Blue Stragglers, main sequence stars apparently much younger than the rest of the cluster: but only apparently. Macroscale Engineering had meddled with the core processes of the stars, throwing them out of their normal evolution.
The whole cluster of M3 stars was itself on an eccentric orbit around the galactic core, moving from 22,000 lightyears at galactic perigee, to 66,000 at galactic apogee. The orbit was canted oddly, to dip 44,000 lightyears above and below the main galactic plane.
Certain orbital elements and epochs given in the Monument revealed that the original orbit had been far more conservative, coplanar with the main disk of the galaxy. The reason for the massive orbital adjustment of this group of half a million stars was not revealed in the relatively crude mathematical sign-language being used.
The idea of a race that could casually sweep a globular cluster into a new orbit around the core of the galaxy left Menelaus awed and horrified.
The imagination of Menelaus for a moment was filled with a menagerie of cat-faced men, or centaurs, three-eyed people, hawk-men and crab-people and zebra-men, worm-creatures or intelligent trees, or dwarfish things with glowing eyes and ballooned skulls. But no: these were merely images from his childhood toon-tales. All that was revealed in the Monument hieroglyphs were energy levels, expressed in terms of multiples of the output of the Diamond Star, and additional mathematical expressions showing the composition of megascale engineering structures.
He told himself these beings could be something much stranger than his simple imaginings. Or even creatures to whom the question of form was meaningless: beings with a science to reshape their bodies and minds at will, to fit any task confronting them. Creatures of pure information.
But what tasks? What was this conquest for?
Montrose muttered, “These are beings of pure mind. Creatures beyond life. Something incomprehensible, someone from beyond the Asymptote. Beyond the event horizon of what we can ever understand. That’s the enemy.”
Rania surprised him by saying, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
In the moment before he recognized the source, he thought it might be Shakespeare, perhaps from some play where bold Scottish kings drew swords in defiance against tyrannical angels. He frowned when it dawned on him that it might be preacher-talk. But Menelaus noticed that hearing it in her dovelike voice, the Good Book seemed not to have that harsh tone, a weird combination of ghostly terror and dusty-hearted killjoy platitudes, it carried back in the days when his mother quoted it to him, or that lying no-account Parson Goodwin from Carl’s Corner in Hill County. It almost sounded like poetry.