He started to laugh with joy, but the meaning of the image suddenly struck him, and the laughter choked in his throat.
“Brother Roger, is this a mistake? The spectrographic reading along the bottom—someone must have flipped the plate into the camera backwards, or—or—”
“No, Doctor,” said the Jesuit, his face pale. “The image is red-shifted, not blue-shifted.”
“She is not heading toward the Earth. She is heading away. Where is she going? Never mind! I know! Damn my balls and eyeballs! She’s leaving! She’s not coming back for me!”
In a rage he raised the photographic plate and smashed it to pieces. He knotted his fists into the hair of his head to keep himself from smashing other things, and he tried to gather so much hair in his hands that he could not pull it out. His hands only indifferently obeyed his commands, so there was considerable yanking on his scalp, and it brought tears to his eyes. More tears.
Bile stung the back of his throat. Menelaus finally parked his head between his knees, waiting to see if he would throw up.
“She even told me. We talked about it!”
“Doctor? Where is she going? To the Hyades? It is one hundred and fifty-one light-years away. She could return in three hundred years or so, which is not an impossible time for a hibernating man to outwait.”
“Not the Hyades.”
“What else is out there?”
Montrose squeezed his eyes shut, wondering if he could induce a brain aneurysm in himself just by sheer anger and willpower. “M3.”
“Where?”
“The Messier Object Three.” Menelaus spoke the words with deliberate care. “It is a galactic cluster, a microgalaxy, hanging almost directly above the disk of the Milky Way, like a wee little bluebottle fly thinking about landing on a pie plate. It’s not some piss-ass little stellar cluster, like Hyades, oh no. Hyades is a few hundred stars, maybe eight hundred. M3 contains half a million to a million suns. M3 also contains an entity, a collection of races or a collection of machines, a power of some sort, a far-posthuman intelligence she labeled the Absolute Authority. That’s what their glyph in the Monument means: their word for themselves is a game theory expression for a player whose moves expand infinitely to all cell matrices and determine all outcomes. It is the boss of Praesepe Cluster, which is five hundred and fifty light-years away; and Praesepe is the boss of Hyades. So M3 is the boss of their boss. Their chain of command is all written out in the Monument. She is going to the top. City Hall. The Front Office. The King. The Judgment Seat.”
“Why go there?”
The words fell from the mouth of Montrose like pebbles of lead. “Vindication. She is going to vindicate the human race.”
“What?”
“If she goes and comes back, it proves that the human race is a starfaring race. It proves we can live long enough and think far enough into the future to carry out interstellar trade and to be governed by interstellar laws. Starfarers got to think long-term, and be greedy enough to wait for a ten-thousand-year payoff, in the case of trade agreements; Godfearing enough to be adverse to ten-thousand-year delayed vengeance. Only polities that care a damn sight more than human beings have been known to care about their way-off way-way-off descendents need apply.”
“And if mankind is tested and proved, and found to be starfarers?”
“It makes us equals. Our servitude to Hyades is abolished. We’re free and debt-free. But Rania has to come back, and there has to be a deceleration laser here ready to receive her, and the people of that generation and aeon, they got to know who she is, recognize her rights, all that good stuff.
“If we forget her,” Montrose continued, “then the Earth fails the test, and we are not smart enough and not long-term enough to deal with the distances star-travel requires.
“So that is my job.” Montrose concluded, “You gotta admit, I am perfectly suited. No one is as goddam stubborn as me. And I am not going to forget her or let the world forget.”
Brother Roger said, “Then your war with Exarchel is over! Because when she returns, and proves we are a starfaring race, the Hyades will recall their world armada, surely, will they not?”
“Oh, I did not mention the distance,” said Menelaus with a groan, smiling a weak smile, crinkling his tearstained cheeks. “I thought you, being an astronomer—”
“I don’t have the Messier catalog memorized, Doctor.”
“It is outside the damn galaxy. M3 is roughly thirty-three thousand nine hundred light-years away. The round-trip at near-lightspeed is over sixty-seven thousand years. She will be back, assuming no delays and no nonsense, by A.D. 70,800. You got that figure in your mind? If you counted to a trillion, and counted one number a second, and you did it twelve hours a day, taking half the day off for eating and sleeping, that is roughly the time involved.”
Brother Roger blinked owlishly. “It is a hard number to imagine, Doctor,” he said slowly.
“Put it in the past instead of the future. That’ll give you a notion of the scale. In order for today to be the day when my wife returned from the gulfs beyond the galaxy, she would have had to have departed from Earth back in the year 60,000 B.C.—about when Neanderthals still walked the Earth. Leaf-point stone tools and the dugout canoe were both new inventions.”
“But the Hyades world armada arrives in A.D. 11,000, does it not? Won’t her actions, the vindication, be far, far too late?”
Menelaus answered, “We have to battle the Hegemony, and stay free all that time, until she comes. And with no antimatter star to mine no more. No power for a new civilization. No nothing. We have to endure. Endure until…”
Montrose shook his head, his sorrow, for a moment, swallowed up in wonder.
“She blasted the damn star out of orbit, and she is accelerating in a right line, straight up out of the plane of the galactic disk, to a little cluster of stars, half a million or so, that hangs like an island in the middle of intergalactic nothingness.”
Brother Roger was silent.
Montrose said, “My war with Del Azarchel is just starting. My war with entropy is just starting. It will be the longest war in history. It will be longer than history. If I lose, the human race remains the slaves of the Hyades Hegemony forever and ever, amen.”
“And if you win, we are free?”
“Sodomize that. What do I care what some big-headed big-arsed post-transhuman half-machine bug-faced thing in the Year Zillion is free or slave? If I win, I get my wife back.” Montrose stood up. “I need a breath of fresh air. Which we cannot get unless you descend thirty miles.”
4. The Sign
Brother Roger Juliac said, “I can take you to the observation platform, where at least you can look out and see the stars.”
Menelaus looked down mournfully at the fragments of the photographic plate he’d smashed. “Sorry about that. I should not have lost my temper.”
“We all lose our temper sometimes.”
“And we all say sorry sometimes when we do! One of my relations, Thucydides, you call him Sixtus the Sixth, which is a dumb name if you ask me, imposed a penalty on me, a punishment. He said I had to stay happy. To wait in joyful hope for her return. That means I cannot give up, cannot give in to despair, can’t let it get to me. I gotta just soldier on.”
Brother Roger led him down a companionway and a set of narrow metal stairs to a bubble of transparent metal hanging like a swallow’s nest precariously from the side of the great cylindrical balloon. The earth below was lined with a blue shadow in the distance, where the sunlight, like a great curving line, still glinted over the retreating sunset. Directly underfoot, all was dark. The wonder of city lights agleam at night, which had for so many years been the joy of astronauts and high flying pilots, was no more. Instead, there were drifting lights like fireflies where flotillas of aeroscaphes were gathered, and here and there, a strange green glint from under the sea, the sign of some activity from the Cetaceans.