There were dreams like water, waves that lashed and lapped at him, pulling him from dizzying fear to disorienting pain, and his thoughts flicked like little fishes and vanished before he could capture them. He dreamed he was falling in an elevator whose cable had snapped. But no, it was not an elevator, but a nuclear-chemical punt. He was surrounded by friends, Del Azarchel was there, but Menelaus could focus on nothing.
There were dreams of smoke, painted rose-hue clouds of ecstasy. In highest spirits, giddy with discovery, he was trying to explain Fermat’s Last Theorem to the people around him, and relating it to how the dust motes stirred by the airlock’s ventilation system glinted so prettily in the lights from the life support controls. The motions were not random, of course: He could see the wave functions involved in his head. But then he was distracted by his visualization of each particular motion of his tongue and throat, conceiving it as a fourth-dimensional tube function, merely a complex geometry.
He realized the inefficiencies of the idiom he was using, and he saw how a universal language of verb-to-noun formations was merely one more application of the zeta function, distributed over complex planes of two related variables. A much simpler language was easy to devise, with the two variables for nouns and verb correlation related to pitch and amplitude, and he began yodeling in it, sure that his companions would quickly catch on to the nuances.
Even this was not efficient enough: if he played with the airlock controls, he could get them to reflect and refract from the dust-motes to express even more channels of communication. Amazing how everything was so filled with meaning, so filled with mathematics. He saw a way of improving the efficiency of the airlock process. All he had to do was adjust the flow dynamics.…
He was quite lucid and reasonable when they hauled him, screaming in the harmonic pitches of a new language he had invented, away from the lock controls.
He was aware of being carried belowdeck, away from the axis. His weight increased, and he watched the stream of orange juice curve from a container to the cup meant for him, and the expression for the Coriolis forces acting on the stream glittered in his mind. Hands forced the nozzle of the cup in his mouth while he laughed and squirmed and broke their fingers between his teeth, and the molecular geometry of the medicines the orange juice hid he deduced from the sour taste on his tongue, and the complex expression for his tongue surface with all its intricate molecular niches.
When the morphine hit, his dreams grew clear and distant, and he was standing with godlike beings outside the universe, timeless creatures of light, gazing gravely down into a dark well from which no signal would ever return.
Other dreams were dull and gray as lead, and lingered on forever. He dreamed he was being buried alive, but no, it was not a coffin, but an icebox, for it was cold here, endlessly cold.
There were also nightmares, things as dark as storm clouds, vortexes of uncontrolled emotion and images of terror: images of being strapped to a pallet while the ancient Dr. Yajnavalkya, the ship’s surgeon, brought the whining drill toward the back of his head, and Del Azarchel floated in the near distance, his features gray and drawn with fear.
Then there were dreams like fog, where he could see, but could feel nothing, and he was merely an onlooker to the actions of some higher being that moved his thoughts for him.
He dreamed of the corridors of the great ship Hermetic. The engine room, when the magnetic line of the drive core was misaligned; the pump room, when the crew was running out of water, and a recycler had to be jury-rigged; the computer room, where the system had to be unlocked, before the life support batteries failed, and he had to convince the computer that the little blond girl was the Captain.
Other dreams, the best dreams, were clear as crystal, and his thoughts slid as effortlessly as a skater on black ice cut with white skate-strokes. Surely these were figure skaters, for the white marks on the dark lake surface were circles, sine-curves, angles, and triangles.
But no, it was not black ice. It was the Monument. The complex concentric circles of the alien symbols beneath his boots suddenly grew lucid and sharp, and the meaning of the signs was obvious.
He stood on or, rather, drifted with his feet pointing toward, the surface of a small moon, and the horizon was so close that the figures standing near him seemed to be leaning away. He meant to explain the layers of meaning to the suited men standing near, in clear and patient language, but something distracted him. For overhead was a blazing sun, too small and too dim, and stars shone unwinking, the vacuum to each side of it. The points of light representing the mining satellites were easy enough to distinguish (particularly now that he had mastered the knack of increasing the number of nerve-firings to his optic nerve), but the flare showed that his warning was too late.
Too late. He was proud of how clear and precise his language was, how he was oriented to time, place, and location, when he explained about the relationship between higher brain functions and the analogous mathematical functions that described bureaucracies in failing political-economy systems, closed systems of feedback orders that led to disaster. He explained to Captain Grimaldi about the reinforcement effects of the wave-functions of crew discontent reaching a node point, but when he touched his shoulder, the Captain rotated stiffly in the zero gravity, and his eyes were like small black buttons pointing in two directions.
Too late. He saw the little six-year-old girl writing out the orders. Her cursive writing was a small deviation from a single line: he could see the mathematical expression of it, and how it related to the Quantum Yang-Mills theory of the geometrical framework of elementary particle formation.
The computer system known as Little Big Brother pointed an optic pickup at the document, and the old men looked on in mingled hope and misery, their eyes hollow, until the mechanical voice box announced in its soft, emotionless, feminine voice that the command was legitimate. There were snaps like gunshots echoing up and down the inner hull as the locks on the coffins clattered open, rainbow-shining, like oil slicks their rich, dark, newly made biononanotechnological fluids, and at the same time, the shining screens of the contraterrene manipulations fields, dull pearl for so long, shined and came to multicolored life.
So often, so often, he dreamed of ice.
There were dreams of burning: Perfect spheres of blue flame hung in space, expanding slowly, with metallic oblongs at their hearts. He stood before the plotting board with the teenage girl, slender and coltish, and examined the spread of acceleration umbrellas for possible fire and counterfire. There might have been danger had the enemy found a proper launch window, but Menelaus could see it was too late. Too late.
But most of all, he dreamt of the Monument. It filled his thoughts. He was standing beneath the naked stars, the blazing sun above, on a worldlet not larger than a mile across; a world shining with meaning. THE MATTER-DISTORTION PROCESS KNOWN AS LIFE WHEN FOUND DISQUIETING THE MAGNETOSPHERE OF THE ANTIMATTER STAR … SUFFIENT UTILITY TO BE HELD IN INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE TO THE IMPERATIVES … ALL OTHER OPTIONS ARE SUBJECT TO RETALIATION … PAIN … DEATH …
He tried to tell the slouching ape-creatures what it all meant, tried to warn them to stop the mining satellites, but they wrestled him down, and fed sedatives into his intravenous drip. Del Azarchel, bearded, unkempt, and lank from months of half-rations, and wearing the Captain’s uniform that in no way fit his frame, looked on with cold, tired, weary eyes, commanding his men to be careful.
2
Personal Sovereignty
A.D. 2214–2217
1. The Starvation Winter
It was cold as he slept, ice cold to his bones, and he dreamed of winter.