“Quoting the scriptures?” he said. “And here I thought you were raised by scientists.”
She was too ladylike to snort, but she did made a noise of disdain in her nose, softer than the sigh of a nightingale. “Scientists including the Franciscan-trained Father Reyes y Pastor, who made sure we had onboard the same Bible Mendel, Copernicus and Lemaître studied.”
“Mass limits were tight,” said Montrose. “I was not even allowed to bring socks.”
“You think it an unnecessary luxury? I agree, the scriptures might have been no good for settling issues of astrophysics, but when I was told how my mother passed away, I read the Book of Job, and I looked down at the stars. This book asked me who laid the cornerstone of the cosmos when the morning stars sang together and what made the Sons of Light all shout for joy? It asked if I could bind the influence of the clustered Pleiades or free the bands of Orion?”
He saw a hint of sorrow in the shake of her silhouetted head. Rania continued, “Those questions comforted me in my grieving, even though I could not answer them; and the answers of science, firm and certain, could not. Through science I deduced, as you did, how I was born, but science, the mere study of matter in motion, will never tell me why.”
“Down at the stars?”
“Stars were never ‘up’ until I reached Earth; the ship carousel, spun for gravity, puts the portholes under your feet, and all the universe is a void to fall into.”
“You know your mom weren’t real.”
“Do mothers not love their stillborn child? I mourned her loss, even if she never lived.”
“You are strange girl.”
“Since you and I, and perhaps by now Ximen, are the only members of our new species, homo sapiens posthomonid, by any rational basis of comparison, not only am I average, I form the only data point.”
Montrose, rather than argue the point, bent his head over the bookpad and read her translation of line 2311 and 2312 of the Xi Segment.
THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE … WHEN FOUND AMONG STARS IN THE ORION ARM BETWEEN THE FOLLOWING EONS AND LOCATIONS [measurements were given in terms of multiples of plank lengths and fractions of proton-decay periods. The volume thus defined included Sol] … NECESSARY FOR SOPHOTRANSMOGRIFICATION [meaning uncertain] … DONE AT THE BEHEST OF AUTHORITY OF M3 GLOBULAR CLUSTER, WHOSE [SERVANTS] DOMINION AT PRAESEPE CLUSTER ORIENT FINAL CAUSATION TO CONFORM TO THIS DIRECTIVE; WHOSE [PETS] DOMINATION AT HYADES CLUSTER PERFORM THE [INSIGNIFICANT] MANUAL LABOR INVOLVED.
“Let me get this straight. On Earth, ten thousand years go by before the little green men even show up. Then another Brazilian vermilion cotillion years go by before we get back from M3 with the court’s verdict. And we don’t know if the court will rule in our favor, because who’s to say their laws and whatnot will stay the same for so long?”
“They are starfarers: they must honor thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past a thousand lightyears. They must honor ten-thousand-year-old expressions of their laws, or else their authority could not reach past ten thousand lightyears. What is the upper radius value for the ambition of M3? We cannot say. But look: their name in this concept-writing means they extend in all directions without limit.”
He shook his head. “Let’s stick with our original plan. We go to the Diamond Star, no farther, gather up as much contraterrene as we can mine via star-lifting, return here, overthrow whatever stupid machine civilization Blackie has tried to set up—if it still exists, which I doubt—and start the long, slow process of building up the human race, and any posthuman races we might have the fancy to create, to fight the Hyades Armada. These equations are not only their advertisement of their intentions, they are also their marching orders—all we have to do is make the human resistance more expensive than it is worth to conquer us. Once there is no hope of profit, they’ll quit. I mean, aren’t we deciding everything on the assumption that these are machine civilizations, electronic brains that are forced to make judgments by these same calculations?”
Rania said, “If we make the human resistance more expensive, all they will do is extend the term of the indenture.”
“The Monument itself is millions of years old. The civilization at M3 could be long dead, or changed its laws, or fallen to war or—anything!”
“Nonetheless, in my capacity as Captain, this concerns matters beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and therefore falls into my jurisdiction.”
“I am not questioning the legality, but the judgment! Are you just acting on blind faith? What makes you think the monsters at M3 (a cloud of stars not even in this damn galaxy!) will respect what is written on that lump of rock circling the Diamond Star, or even be alive? Aren’t they changing and growing and dying, even if they are machine-things? What is your evidence?”
“The Monument expresses something never seen on Earth, a calculus of history, a science of which our economics and politics are mere unsystematic gropings, based on guesswork and sentiment. Their laws are deductions, not proscriptions, of how their future generations will and must behave, or, since they may long ago have solved the technical problems of decay and death, the future generations may be the selfsame individuals who wrote this promise.”
“But it could be a lie!”
“To what end? Why tell us the means of manumission if they meant us not to use it?”
“Hellfire! D’you expect me to understand how the bug-men living in pools of methane who eat their parents for lunch might think with their nine brains? What if it is fiction? A joke? Graffiti? A psalm in their religion that they only mean on Sunday? What if it is some emotion or custom or nerve-malfunction humans just don’t have that prompted them to write something for a reason we don’t and can’t understand?”
“The fact that the Monument itself is the product of a rational intelligence, a message deliberately set to be seen and read by all comers, allows us to suppose it means what it means until proven otherwise. Why do you assume the Armada from Hyades is real but deny that the Authority who can free us from the domination of the Armada is also real? Your skepticism seems to be unidirectional.”
“But that does not prove it!”
“Life is not a bench of law, nor a scientist’s workbench. We have partial information. A hint. A clue. Life allows us see a shadow in the darkness, and we must guess its true shape. But life forces us to decide, before we know with perfect knowledge, how we shall confront the unknown. Who gave you this foolish idea that evidence must be certain before it can be affirmed? Before us is the unknown. The universe is black and wide. The option to be all-knowing is not open to us. Our options are to act as if the unknown will bring us evil, which is the response called fear; or to act as if the unknown will bring us good, which is the response called hope. The first response is certainly self-fulfilling; the second may be.”
Montrose had no good answer for that, so he said, “It still sounds like blind faith.”
“Blind compared to what? All real life is decided by guesswork, intuition, judgment, determination, and not established by omniscience. Did you examine the future before you married me? Where is your evidence that our love will endure?”
“I fell in love. And I gave my oath. I will make it endure.”
“Well, I took an oath also, to find and carry out my purpose in life. Here I have found it. I will make the Authority at M3 to manumit the human race; I will make us starfarers. We will have the future, brilliant with glory, the human race has always dreamed of, and may yet deserve!”
He had no good answer for that, either, so he turned off the book and kissed her. He did not know if that would be the right thing to do, but he hoped it was.