It is no exchange, spoke the voice, answering Del Azarchel. I shall grant sanctuary to Amphithöe because it is the right thing to do. You will assist me because it is the right thing to do.

Del Azarchel said, “I can agree to nothing blind. Tell us the nature of this assistance we can offer? And answer the other mysteries that confound us. Why did Domination of the Hyades, so far above us in the evolutionary scale, attack us merely to depart again? Why did they not stay and rule, as is there right? Why? What purpose is served? Will they never come again? Must man ever be alone?” And into his voice there crept a note of inner torture.

But there was no reply from Captain Isonadey, who was even then clutching his head, and speaking in his own strange three-part Melusine voice again. Montrose looked up. Beneath the horns of the crescent moon, all was dark once more. The three flares of extraterrestrial light had winked out.

4

Whitefriars of Tycho

1. Visions of Stars and Clouds

Compared to the distance separating Earth from Jupiter, the interval of airless void severing Earth from moon was small indeed. But the pinnace boat was not a great sailing vessel, and carried limited fuel. The voyage took weeks.

Aboard were Amphithöe, Del Azarchel, and Montrose, each in a hibernation coffin. Del Azarchel and Montrose, as before, slightly thawed their neural tissue, and remained mentally active, as if disembodied.

The boat’s telescopes studied an artifact found at L5, a stable orbital point directly between Earth and moon. The Swans had built, or perhaps grown, a cluster of space stations that looked like jellyfish or crystal wheels, and smaller vessels like origami foil or slivers of bright steel hung in a cloud around them, tethered or docked. The stations were dark, emitting neither heat nor energy, the remnant of some long-past space program or war effort.

After that, Montrose from his coffin noticed the telescopes drawing power, turning outward. Del Azarchel was surreptitiously studying the black skies again. Montrose used the same trick he had used before—he was confident Del Azarchel had not detected his little mole in the data feed—surreptitiously to see what Del Azarchel was looking at.

This time it was not exosolar planets.

Del Azarchel directed instruments and onboard analysis resources toward PSR B2224+65 in the direction of Cygnus the Swan. This was a pulsar, a pulsating neutron star, six miles in diameter and yet with a mass greater than the sun, plunging through the heavens like a blind fallen angel, X-ray jets radiating from the dark body like torn wings of invisible fire. What cosmic disaster had accelerated two octillion tons of matter from a standstill to over 620 miles per second, about one-half of one percent of the speed of light?

Slower, but more menacing, was Gliese 710 in the constellation Serpens Cauda, the Tail of the Serpent with whom Ophiuchus wrestled. This small K-type star was sixty-three lightyears from Sol and closing. It was destined to collide with the Solar System in one and a half million years.

Del Azarchel turned the telescopes again. The images were from black and blank interstellar space.

Except the space was not empty. The interstellar medium was much thicker than early, earthbound astronomy had predicted. Frozen gas giants like hulks of hydrogen by the hundreds, smaller solid worlds by the thousands, icebergs and mountains by the myriads, all thronged the alleged emptiness of space but, issuing no light, had been undetectable by the ancients.

Montrose felt a pang of fear for his wife. How could any ship survive such hidden reefs and rocks? Rocks? No. At the relative speeds these bodies moved, call it a shooting gallery, a no-man’s-land of shells and bombs, or some roaring Norse pit of chaos older and deeper than Hell.

Gas and dust were everywhere, in streamers and clouds, held away from each star by its tiny bubble of solar wind.

The Local Interstellar Cloud was thirty lightyears wide and included the dim and nearby spark of Promixa, Altair spinning like a mad ballerina, blazing Vega, cyclopean Arcturus, and bright Fomalhaut ringed with its countless planetoids. The cloud was flowing ever outward from a star-forming region called the Scorpius-Centaurus Association, which in turn was merely an arm of a larger and older complex of star-forming molecular clouds, like a massed flotilla of thunderheads.

Montrose could not shake from his imagination the odd fancy that he was spying the red-lit smolder and fume of smokestacks from the furnaces of great, blind, slow and antique titans, creating stars on their forges like weapons of fire, and shining planets like jewels.

When its evolution across the eons was seen at once, the Local Interstellar Cloud waxed and waned like a campfire flickering, or like a vast, dark beast breathing. The Local Cloud eerily ate into the larger, finer neighboring G-cloud complex, which was centered around Alpha Centauri, almost as if struggling with blind and smoky limbs to consume it.

Suppose the Local Interstellar Cloud were indeed a living thing? Could it even notice the existence of Earth’s sun, any more than a man could notice a mitochondria? Or notice Earth any more than a man notices an atom of carbon floating in the fluid of his eye?

Montrose drove the nightmarish sensations crawling through his brain away with an effort of will. A simpler question was at hand. He wondered what Del Azarchel sought among these strange astronomical splendors.

A few weeks later, nearing the moon, the pinnace passed not far from a rotovator. This was a shining length of ultra-tensile cable, miles long, used to add kinetic energy to vessels seeking higher orbit, or to subtract from those descending. It was old, unlit, unrotating, empty of ships.

Their flight path required them to orbit the moon and shed speed. As they made the final approach, the antique rotovator sank in the distance in the east, fell behind the bright limb of the moon’s rim, and was gone.

2. Tycho Crater

His still-active nervous system connected to instruments in the hull, Montrose studied the orb below.

Gone was the tide-locked moon of his youth, black and silver as a lapwing. Now it was black and yellow as a goldfinch, and the seas were peacock-hued like stained glass, and each hour new hills and maria came over the horizon into view. Eventually their destination passed beneath.

Tycho had once been the youngest large crater on the moon, less than one hundred eight million years old, with walls tall and sharp. To each side smaller craters gaped, created by ejecta from the Tycho impact: Sasserides and Pictet, Street and Longomontanus. Shadowy impressions remained of those once-vast craters now that a new crater, almost a sea, had been formed directly on the same spot as Tycho, and the new layer of lava and ejecta had bathed them. Tycho was therefore once again the youngest crater on the moon.

Once there had been, radiating out in each direction, an immense system of rays partly reaching around the great curve of the moon formed by streams of tektites, countless pebbles bright as snow, each with its distinctive shape, tear-drop or sinuous or globular, depending on how far from the crater it fell.

Most of those rays long ago had vanished, not just because so many tektites had been carried back to Earth during the Second Age of Space as fortune-telling charms, but because Del Azarchel had blacked out vast swathes of the surface to draw his hand there; and, ages later, the seas and dark areas of surface had been coated with self-replicating logic diamond tawny as the skin of a lioness; and, later still, the lunar face of living gold was first shattered and then inscribed by the weapons of the Asmodel of Hyades with notations: circles with ovals, triangles within triangles, endless nested sinewaves like the patterns left by a receding sea in the sand. The vast inscription covered about an eighth of the hemisphere.