The Hermetic Millennia

Book 2: The Eschaton Sequence

by John C. Wright

Genres: Alien Invasion; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Hermetic Millennia, by John C. Wright, is a kaleidoscopic vision of future history and human evolution--perfect for fans of hard sci-fi and space opera.

Continuing from Count to a Trillion, Menelaus Illation Montrose—Texas gunslinger, idealist, and posthuman genius—has gone into cryo-suspension following the discovery that, in 8,000 years, a powerful alien intelligence will reach Earth to assess humanity's value as slaves.

Montrose intends to be alive to meet that threat, but he is awakened repeatedly throughout the centuries to confront the woes of an ever-changing and violent world, witnessing millennia of change compressed into a few years of subjective time.

The result is a breathtaking vision of future history like nothing before imagined: sweeping, tumultuous, and evermore alien, as Montrose's immortal enemies and former shipmates from the starship Hermetic harness the forces of evolution and social engineering to continuously reshape the Earth in their image, seeking to create a version of man the approaching slavers will find worthy.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: December 24, 2012

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 400

Sample

1
Theft of Fire


A.D. 2535
1. Sir Guy
All he wanted to do was stay dead.
Menelaus Montrose woke up while his body was still frozen solid. The bioimplants the battle surgeons of the Knights Hospitalier had woven into his brain stem were working well enough for him to send a signal to the surface of the coffin, activate the pinpoint camera cells dotting its outer armor, and see who was trying to wake him up.
The light in the crypt was dim. The walls were irregular brick, and in places were cemented with bones and skulls. Niches held both coffins for the dead and cryonic suspension coffins for the slumbering.
There was a figure like a metal ape near the vault door, which had moved on vast pistons and stood open. The light spilled in from here. Only things near the door were clear.
To one side of the larger metal statue was a marble sculpture of Saint Barbara, the patron of grave-diggers, holding a cup and a palm leaf in her stiff, stone hands; to the other was Saint Ubaldo, carrying a crosier, whose office was to ward off neural disorders and obsessions. Above the vault door was a relief showing the martyrdom of Saint Renatus Goupil under the tomahawks of Iroquois. He was the patron saint of anesthesiologists and cryonicists. Above all this, in an arch, were written the words TUITIO FIDEI ET OBSEQUIUM PAUPERUM.
From this, Menelaus knew he had been moved, at least once, from his previous interment site beneath Tiber Island in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital vault. That had been little over a quarter century ago: the calculations of Cliomancy did not predict any historical crisis sufficient to require him to be relocated in so short a space as thirty years. That meant Blackie was interfering with the progression of history again.
The larger metal statue moved, ducking its head and stepping farther into the vault. Menelaus could see the Maltese cross enameled in white on the red breastplate. There were four antennae and microwave horns on his back, folded down. The scabbard for his (ceremonial) broadsword was empty, and so was the holster for his (equally ceremonial) chemical-energy pistol. Between helmet and goggles and breather mask, the figure looked like a nightmarish bug.
Montrose turned on the microphones on the outside of the coffin, and special cells in his brain stem sent signals to receivers dotting the inner coffin lid, and also to implants lining his auditory nerve. It sounded like a strange, flat, echoless noise, not like something that actually came through his ear, but he could make it out.
Menelaus turned on the speaker vox. "Why do you disturb my slumber, Sir Knight?"
He heard the ticking hum of motors and actuators coming from the armored figure. Like a mountain sinking into the sea, the big armored figure knelt. Menelaus realized this was strength-amplification armor. He tried to work out the Cliometric constellation of a set of military circumstances where this type of gear would serve any purpose that a sniper with a powerful set of winged remotes could not serve better, and his imagination failed. Unless the man was wrestling giants, or facing enemies who could walk up to arm's length and tear the flesh from his bones, he did not see the purpose.
"My apologies, sleeper. Ah. Our records are somewhat dark. Are you Menelaus Montrose? You don't sound like him."
"Why the poxy hell do you disturb my poxy slumber, Sir goddam Knight?"
"Ah! Montrose! Good to hear you again, Liege."
"Guy? Sir Guy, is that you?"
"Pellucid thawed me out two days ago. As we agreed, I have a veto over anyone trying to disturb you, even your pet machine. And it is His Excellency Grandmaster Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim now. They promoted me when I slept."
"Yeah, they do poxified pox like that to you when you ain't up and about to fend it off."
Another implanted circuit in his brain stem made contact with a library cloth stored in an airtight capsule inside the coffin armor. The self-diagnostic showed much more deterioration than he would have expected. Half the circuits were dead, and file after file was corrupt. But he brought up the calendar, and a fiber fed the pixy image directly into the same neural circuits he was using to peer through the cameras.
"Pox! Thirty-five years. Rania's not back yet? Any signals?"
"I have not heard, Liege. There is something that may be a signal. I would have prevented them from thawing you, if it were not significant."
"So tell me."
"An astronomer has detected massive energy discharges erupting from the Diamond Star. So it looks like your Princess arrived there years ago, and we are seeing now the result of some sort of macro-scale engineering. The data are ambiguous, and the Order thought you would want, with your own eyes, to look the data over and draw your own conclusion. Was I right to wake you?"
"Damn right, and thank you for asking. Have the astronomer send his data into the coffin. I can tell you the input-output registers."
"I'd rather you thawed out fully."
"My brain is working. What else do I need?"
"There has been a lot of wire corruption since you slumbered, Liege, and the Order made laws saying certain messages have to be delivered in person, naked eye, naked ear. Nobody uses or trusts the kind of interface implants you and I have."
Montrose was not just surprised; he was shocked. His Cliometric calculations had not anticipated such a radical change in the basic social and technological patterns. One more thing to look into before he slumbered again. He said wryly: "Relicts already, eh?"
"A quarter century is a long time. And they insist I wear clothing, like an unevolved."
"You ain't talking aloud, are you?"
"No, Liege. Nerve jack. My suit has a short-range emitter."
It took a long while for the molecular machinery clustered in the major cell groups in his vital organs, bone marrow, and parasympathetic system to restore him to life. Even through the nerve-block, there was something like growing pains, and his limbs trembled and shuddered. The last thing to happen was that special artificial glands released adrenaline into his system, and implants made of his own jinxed flesh, like the Hunter's organ and Sach's organ of electric eels, flushed with positively charged sodium and jolted his heart into action. Automatic circuits performed a few tests, just as undignified and invasive as anything a doctor would do, but with no bedside manner. Menelaus just gritted his teeth.
Montrose came up out of the gel, dripping, a white glass caterpillar-drive pistol in either hand. These 8-megajoule Brownings were waterproof, slightly curved, streamlined tubes of a white glassy substance, made with no moving parts and powered by a radioactive pellet likely to last 4.47 billion years. And they fitted nicely into his hands. (But he still missed his six-pound hand cannon as long as his forearm that he had used for dueling. The old Krupp railgun had been a handsome piece of artillery.)
Sir Guiden was still on one knee. He had removed his bulky helm, slung his goggles, and the wire from his skull-jack lay across his neck.
Underneath, his hair was close cropped, and he wore a black leathery cap that buckled under his chin. His face was rounder and fleshier than Menelaus remembered from 2501. Was that a touch of gray at the temples?
His age was hard to tell, since Sir Guiden sported a full-face tattoo shaped like a double-headed eagle: Wings surrounded his eyes, crooked talons curled on his cheeks, and twin hawk heads bearing crowns tilted left and right over his eyebrows. Montrose thought it one of the ugliest and most absurd decorations imaginable.
Montrose said, "I was wondering why you stepped in here all in full kit."
"Because you are known to sleep with guns in your hands, sir. That, and no one else could talk to you."
"So no one else has implants? The whole idea was that I could thaw my brain up to dehibernation, while leaving the rest of me iced, and that would save on wear and tear. Hurts like the pestilential devil to shock the heart awake, you know. Why couldn't they just use a hand mic? Clip it to the coffin?"
"The technology is hard to come by, Liege. The automated factories were under Exarchel's control."
"What about that motorized ape suit?"
"You like it?" asked Sir Guiden, pleased.
"May my member get pustules if'n I don't! Always wanted future soldiers to dress in roboexoskeletons. But it seems damnified impractical, and I surely don't recall you wearing nothing alike to them when you climbed in your coffin."
"I thawed in 2508 and again in 2526 to oversee certain operations."
"War operations?"
"That, and moving the buried coffins when Rome was burned by orbital mirrors. The Vatican is gone."
"How many people killed?"
"None. The city was already evacuated due to banner storms of hunger silk. The Consensus insisted that every city have an evac procedure in place, with an aeroscaphe like a lifeboat folded against the side of every house and tower. Lucky they did."
"I don't care about that," said Montrose. He planned to have the current events, no matter how dramatic, be ancient history before he woke again. "Tell me about my coffins."
"Safe. You'll be interested to know I used your money to purchase Cheyenne Mountain from the government of Kansas."
"That's in Colorado."
"There are six territories in the North American plains region calling themselves the United States of America. I made the land purchase from George Washington of the Government of the United States of America that is based in Topeka."
"George Washington?"
"His name was Joua Ja Gomez before he was acclaimed to his position. All the leaders in Kansas become George Washington. He wears a tricornered hat and dresses in red, white, and blue. Very colorful. But Cheyenne Mountain and the surrounding land are now officially a part of the sovereign territory of Malta, and under the government and suzerainty of the Grand Master of the Order."
Menelaus wondered how many more centuries the Knights of Malta would continue to hold government meetings, considering that they had not held Malta since Napoleon kicked them off it. They retreated without a fight, having sworn an oath never to raise weapons against other Christians.
"There is an old buried fortress beneath Cheyenne Mountain," Sir Guiden said, "that should last thousands of years. If we move you there secretly, we might be able to endure undisturbed for longer."
Menelaus realized that the kneeling man was waiting for permission to get to his feet. "Up! You don't have to stand on ceremony with me, or wait for permission to wipe your bottom in the jakes. So who is this we? And why are we going to be holed up a thousand years? The Diamond Star is only fifty light-years away."
The armored figure, with a hiss of motors, rose to his feet, spine straight as a rifle barrel. "We are. The Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of Saint John, of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, of Malta, and of Colorado agreed to guard you in your coffin, Your Honor. We took an oath. I personally swore to you. Do you think merely the passage of time will cow me? Ninety men and eight stand without these doors, ready to retaliate upon any who would desecrate holy ground, where the honored dead lay themselves down, waiting."
"It was ninety-nine when I went under, not counting you."
"One of them, Sir Alof Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, during the thaw of 2526 was granted leave to depart the order that he might wed a current girl."
"So why are we talking about a thousand years?"
"Thousands, sir. With an s."
"You ain't gunna tell me, are you? You have to drag this out and keep me on pins and needles."
"Liege, there are some things that you must see with your own eyes. The observatory is directly above us, and drawing nigh."
2. The Empire of the Air
Montrose was pleased, if a little shocked, that Sir Guy allowed him to walk around under the sky. It implied that assassins of the Cryonarchy were no longer seeking his life.
The Cryptonarchs had been, at one time, the only people Montrose thought he could trust with the secret of xypotechnology, cryotechnology, and with the power of the antimatter recovered from V886 Centauri, the Diamond Star. They had been his own extended family, grandsons and great-grandsons of cousins and nephews.
But the Cryonarchs proved unworthy of the trust Montrose had invested, and had fallen prey to time, to corruption, to weariness. He had removed them from power by the simple expedient of altering the orbital elements of the remaining world supply of antimatter, a few ever-dwindling crystals of anticarbon diamond. These centaurs occupied orbits beyond Neptune, where encounters with particles of normal matter were rare, but not so far as to encounter the paradoxically thicker areas of deeper, transplutonian space, where there was no solar light-pressure to clear particles away. Then Montrose had given the orbital elements to a priest named Thucydides Montrose, along with his latest formulation to create augmented intelligence.
Montrose was not much of a churchgoing man himself, but the Roman Catholic Church had been in business two and a half millennia, older than any institution of man. He was wagering that Black del Azarchel, a Spanish Roman Catholic, would not lightly destroy it.
Looking up at the heavens, Montrose had the sinking sensation that he might lose that bet. Because there was a second reason why it might be safe to walk around under the naked sky, aside from the remission of the Cryonarchy vendetta against him. Sniper technology must have fallen to a new low. That implied a widespread civilizational collapse.
Clouds the hue of iron hid the sky, and drizzle fogged the air. Before him was a cathedral made of gray stone, withered with age, with a rose window like a cyclops eye, and two square bell-steeples rearing like port and starboard conning towers on some motionless ship of stone.
Angels with mossy faces stood on posts to either side of iron gates rusted open. The boneyard was beyond.
To judge from the names on the tombstones, this place was in England or North America. He assumed he was in the northeastern states, Blondie territory, or what had been back in his day. Outside the walls, he saw deciduous forest, nude and wintry, stretching over hill country. Directly beyond the cathedral gates, a trail of smaller trees ran straight downhill, but there were not even fragments of asphalt or macadam present to show if there had once been a motorcar road there.
Behind the cathedral and its outbuildings were structures he did not recognize, tall metal-sided towers topped with windowless domes that looked a bit like grain silos. Above them, hanging in the air were long streamers, hundreds of yards tall, rippling slightly in the rainy breeze. They were made of blue gray material, semitransparent, and were almost invisible against the cloudy background. They looked like collectors gathering particles out of the air and drawing them down for storage in the silos.
Overhead, huge, imposing, larger than a submarine, hung an airship. Sir Guiden raised his hand. The ship descended, but Montrose could see neither ground crew nor docking tower.
The air vessel needed none. From a hatch in the bottom gondola stretched many long snakelike tendrils or whips of metal. Guided by some unseen intelligence, they reached down and formed man-sized loops. The upper length of the tendrils flexed and moved, expanding and contracting to compensate as the wind made the airship roll and yaw. The lower lengths were as motionless as if they were embedded in glass, and hung three feet off the ground.
One of the tendrils held in its loop a ship's crewman, who was lowered from the body of the craft to the ground, like a circus girl wrapped in the trunk of an elephant. The figure was slim and slight, long-haired, and wrapped in a long blue gray toga.
The goggles of Sir Guiden were staring upward as the robed figure descended, but it was impossible to see the knight's expression. Montrose was standing next to him, a scarecrow next to a tin man, his gaunt body hidden in a poncho and his thin hook-nosed face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed duster.
Fifty of the Knights Hospitalier in their powered armor stood deployed on the lawn, some atop the walls, some among the mausoleums, some standing at ease nearby. The armor did not move, but every helmet had optic fibers as fine as the antennae of crabs, which swayed left and right, up and down, front and behind, as each man used his motionless goggles to look in all directions. Every pair of boots bore the golden spurs of knighthood, even though no horse ever made could have long endured the mechanized armor in its saddle. Equally archaic were the claymores, katara punching daggers, and Broomhandle Mauser pistols dangling at jaunty angles from their baldrics and cinctures. Less anachronistic were the launchers or particle-beam lances slung each from an articulated shoulder mount. The air support corps consisted of ten men, each carrying a winged drone called a hawk on his wrist. The narrow glass instrument heads of the drones on the wrists of their masters ticked back and forth as hypnotically and restlessly as the optic antennae of the motionless men.
The Knights must have assumed the descending blue-robed figure no threat, since, aside from a rippling among their antennae, they made no move as he swung close to Montrose.
The slender figure, Montrose saw as he was lowered in a swoop, was a male. The swath of robes that swirled around his limbs must have been smart material, woven with thousands of tiny motile fabric strands, because a hood unfolded by itself to shade the man's features from the rain. The full-body tattoos that had been fashionable in earlier days were not in evidence. However, the man had decorations, complex as circuitry diagrams, imprinted in colored inks onto his hands and fingers, feet and toes. The feet decorations glowed red, and shed heat when the man stepped on the cold grass.
"Woggy! Friendlies and mates! Are we ready for up-go, no?"
Menelaus said, "No. You gunna land that thing?"
"The fair Soaring Azurine never lands! The serpentines can hoist. Or are you easily dazed?"
Menelaus spit on the ground. "I reckon I daze about as well or poorly as the next feller."
"We can have the serpentines lower a booth, if you don't want to dare the hoist. These are too current for you, no? The booth is opaque, and there is no sensation, no jar. You can balance a land glass atop an egg on your head, brim-full, with water tension curving above the level, and your hair will be dry as before as after you jerk up."
"I'll use the hoist."
Almost before words cleared his mouth, slithering steel tightened and tugged. Montrose yelped as the ground slid dizzily away from his feet. The steel snake made a motion like an anteater pulling an ant into its mouth, and Montrose was inside the hatch, and the deck of the airship was beneath him. It was that rapid.
Whatever controlled the tendrils must have assumed he spoke for Sir Guiden, because the armored figure was wrapped in a second steel snake and also lifted swiftly and smoothly into the ship.
The people current to this age evidently were used to vertigo, because the checkerboard pattern of the deck had every other panel transparent, and showed the dun earth swaying underfoot. Large, slanting windows looked out right and left; a dome showed the bottom of the lifting body above. The slight motions of the wind rippling against the cigar-shaped gas bag overhead were imparted to the deck, so a smooth and gentle pitch and roll continually rocked the cabin.
The cabin was appointed in a lush, even sybaritic style: Gilded fountains made eye-confounding patterns of water and spray amidships, couches and settees on flexible silvery caterpillar legs swayed to either side, heaped with pillows, furs, and cushions. Small tables shining with what might have been musical instruments or fluted wineglasses hung above and below eye level, and were held on the long and gently swaying tendrils the crewman had called serpentines. The serpentines, like well-trained servants, were never in the way. Menelaus spent a moment amusing himself, rushing and jumping back and forth, trying to get one of them to trip him or snag his neck clothesline-style, but the sleek metal tentacles were too agile and too well programmed and slithered neatly aside.
Someone coughed politely. Montrose stopped his game and looked. Here were three figures: the man who had welcomed him, and two women. All three were dressed in translucent blue gray ankle-length togas of smart material with filmy capes and scarves of the same material floating from their shoulders. The fabric flowed and flickered oddly around their limbs, togas rippling like living things, and the translucent swallow-tailed capes fluttered like wings in a breeze. All were barefoot and slender. One woman, the taller, willowy blonde, wore a wreath of flowers, but aside from this, the fantastic headgear of the Cryonarchy had thankfully passed into history. The shorter and younger woman wore a purple sapphire shaped like a teardrop on her brow, with an untamed mass of hair dyed a luminous hue of purple framing her thin face, her eyelids painted black. Her eyes were violet and wild.
The long-haired man who greeted them on the ground, Menelaus realized, had not been "crew." This was a private ship, a houseboat, not a military vessel.
A fourth figure, also a man, was dressed in the black cassock and white dog collar of a cleric, his garb from days older than Montrose's own. It was this man who stepped forward and offered his hand.
"I am Brother Roger Juliac of Beeleigh, Society of Jesus."
"Meany Montrose. Howdy do."
"Yes, Highly Honored. I know of you," intoned Brother Roger with an inclination of his head. "I am the astronomer who discovered the anomaly."
The man had the hard and rugged face and thickset build of a boxer. Montrose could not imagine anyone who looked less like a man of the cloth, or an astrophysicist.
Montrose still had caterpillar-drive pistols in both his fists, so he took his right pistol, thrust it butt first into the surprised man's left hand, and then clasped his right. After the handshake, he snatched his pistol back.
Sir Guiden, watching this exchange, said to Montrose over the silent, internal channel they shared, "Liege, you know the gesture of a handshake is meant to show that you have no weapon in your sword hand."
"Really? I figure handing the friar my shooting iron shows I am even more peaceful than that. You gunna take off your helmet?"
Sir Guy said silently, "The shipmaster and his wives are dressed in hunger silk. It can be used as a weapon. The micropores can flay skin and strip proteins out of the blood and muscle exposed."
"If these folk are so fierce, why'd we leave our goon squad below?"
Sir Guy replied, "The airskiff serpentines will protect you from attack, if you are a friend, and the men could not protect you from them, if you are a foe."
Menelaus had noticed that the gondola did not have any armor, or locks on the ports or hatches. Since anyone hoisted aboard was wrapped in deadly metal cable, and remained in reach thereafter, and since the people aboard wore yards of smart cloth that apparently could eat a man's face, perhaps locks and bars were not needed.
Meanwhile, at the same time, Menelaus was talking aloud to the Jesuit with his real mouth and listening with his real ears. The first thing he said was, "What anomaly?"
Brother Roger said, "This is Tessa Azurine, and her permanent paramour, Woggy Azurine, and the sexpartner is called Third, since she is between names at the moment. I am their mendicant and confessor."
The man waved and grinned. "Gulps! Bro Ro is weight-valued, since the Giants be less like to scald flocks what have a spook-speaking man amidst. Not mendicant he!"
The taller of the two women curtsied like a willow bending, and her blue gray robes writhed like mist. "We scorn no refugee; we share lift, fire, and salt. ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Adam hath not where to lay his head.' You are a Sylph of Time as we are Sylphs of Wind, blown you know not where."
The girl with the purple hair and the gem on her brow was pouting like a child, and her eyes were not focused on anything in the environment around her. She spoke aloud to no one in particular, "How about Trey? No? Like a card."
Montrose grunted. "Yeah, um, pleezta-meetcha, gals, guy, nice digs. Sure hope y'all feel better soon."
The willowy, flower-crowned woman, Tessa, said, "But we are not sick, no?"
"I ain't touching that line with a boat hook, ma'am. Brother Roger, what anomaly?"
The Jesuit said to her, "Tessa, if you could ask the Azurine to ascend to the observatory, it should be passing through the area directly."
Tessa said, "Azurine, my adored, acknowledge the order."
A melodic voice answered from the wall, sounding like wind chimes. "I delight to obey, my adored. I ascend. For your delight, I play an ascension theme from your preference profile." A haunting sequence of woodwinds and plaintive chords drifted through the air, soft and without melody, but a trumpet added a note of triumph when the airship broke through the cloud, as if through a gray floor, up into dazzling daylight.
Montrose said to the priest, "You! Now that the pleasantries are done, what poxy anomaly?"
Brother Roger said, "Energy discharges from V886 Centauri. The radiospectrography and gamma ray analysis are constant with an, ah, interplanetary event."
"No damn point in pausing for drama, Padre, because I grade on info, not on delivery."
Brother Roger said, "Ah. As you say. We believe the ice giant planet Thrymheim was driven into the star. The terrene matter of the superjovian world interacted with the contraterrene plasma of the star's atmosphere."
Thrymheim was the single planet orbiting the Diamond Star. It held a far Neptunian orbit, beyond where the antimatter in the solar wind could reach, and so was not disintegrated.
"Driven in why? As a weapon?"
Brother Roger shook his head. "Criswell mining operates by inducing a ring-current around the star by ionically charged beams oppositely directed from each other. Usually the mining satellite ring is equatorial, so that the ejection mass—"
"By Mother Mary changing baby Jesus' stinking holy diapers, Padre! I was on the expedition, and I am a star miner, so I know how the damn process works!"
Brother Roger said, "There are dark lines in the spectrographic analysis consistent with an off-center arrangement of the mining orbitals, Honored."
"Blight and clap! What are the vectors?"
Brother Roger said, "I have not been able to deduce, from the limited information available fifty light-years away, what the various constituent pressures—"
"You are saying the mining satellites focused the explosion like a jet engine."
"Explosions. So we speculate, Honored."
"Which way is it pointing? Wait. Explosions, with an s, plural?"
"Indeed, Honored."
"She broke the damn planet into bits, made it into an asteroid stream, and is feeding in one or two earth-masses at a time. Thrymheim was fifteen hundred and ninety earth-masses, as I recall. The whole solar system, Monument and everything, has been turned into a damned Orion drive, just on a massive scale."
Sir Guiden turned on his suit speakers, to let the people in the cabin hear the question, "Liege! How do you know it is she?"
"Meaning what?" Montrose said.
Sir Guiden said, "The Bellerophon was lighter than the Hermetic, and should have overtaken her either when they made starfall at V886 Centauri, a few months more or less. We tend to think of red dwarfs as small and dim, but a sailing ship can reflect and focus a beam of star energy to burn targets across interplanetary distances, and small stars have more than enough power for that."
"The pursuit ship didn't have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel's second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You're thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?
Sir Guiden said, "Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?"
"Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!"
Sir Guiden said, "How not?"
"I know Blackie. He don't think this big. Oh, this is her work, all right." Montrose threw back his head and laughed. "What a gal! Did I tell you she's mine?"
Brother Roger said diffidently, "Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—"
"It's eight thousand five hundred years until the Hyades Armada arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We're too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don't mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger-than-worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What's it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can tow only about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round-trip, and not too much over."
Brother Roger said, "Honored, I don't follow you."
"Rania blasted the Diamond Star out of its orbit around the galactic core, and is bringing the Diamond Star here. It is a dwarf star holding a ten-decillion-carat diamond made of antimatter, and if she parks it in an orbit inside our heliopause, where the interstellar medium is thin, we can go mine it in a reasonable time. How about the antimatter source is thirteen light-hours away rather than fifty light-