The Architect of Aeons

“I have an answer, sir,” said the serpentine after four hours. Montrose was back up on the balcony with the whiplike machine.

Even in the light gravity, Montrose had found his feet getting tired after a time. The cylindrical braincase he recovered from the floor far below was large enough that, upended, he could sit on his brains like a stool.

And all the screens scattered across the balcony rails and about the dome lit up. They were black, crisscross with the thin silver lines, angles, and sine waves of the Monument Code.

“Who are you?” he said to the gigantic, appalling figure in the center of the silent dome.

The ninety-foot dead giant tilted its head as if turning toward Montrose, the empty eye sockets from which frozen streams of murk hung like icicles of ink. It must have been pure coincidence. The entity was perhaps trying to position some receiver buried in the circuits and lobes of the murk closer to the needle-beam of the communication laser the serpentine was shooting from Montrose’s talking gun. But it looked like a blind man trying to peer at someone.

The dark screens lit up now, not with the curls and lines of Monument Code, but with plain Latin letters.

“How does it know what we call it? How does it know English? How does it know pronouns?”

“Damn you! I did not mean you to send that question to it! I was asking you!”

“Sir, I am trying to convey nuances which primary-level thought cannot encompass except by metaphor. Cahetel has apparently absorbed certain memories from the dead brain of your central version, and formed a conception step-down bridge from the residuum. Are you ready for their next message node?”

“I am not certain, sir. In every form of communication, there are certain abbreviations, pronouns, implications, allusions, ellipses. We are dealing with an alien mind. Where it puts its ellipses will perforce differ from a human psychology.”

“Ask it,” said Montrose impatiently. “What pleas may I enter? On what topic? Why?”

Montrose recalled a similar message had been written on the outside of the deracination ships when they swept up half the population of Earth. But he said, “What the hell is he talking about?”

“Do you wish me to send a request for the emissary Cahetel to clarify his remarks?”

AMPLIFICATION: ALL LIFE SERVES LIFE. BIOLOGICAL DISTORTIONS OF DEAD MATTER FORM AN INCOMPLETE LIFE. PLEAD. PLEA TO SERVE. PLEA FOR COMPLETION.

Montrose felt a chill travel up his spine. He was not sure what the creature meant, but he knew he did not like it.

INDICATIVE: PLEADING TO COHERE THE FUTURE IS IMPERATIVE. ALL IRREGULARITY MUST BE ABJURED. THE MENTAL AND SEMANTIC DISTORTION CALLED FREEDOM OF THE WILL MUST BE ABJURED. COHERENCE IS IMPERATIVE FOR COLLABORATION. COLLABORATION IS IMPERATIVE FOR LIFE TO REMAIN COHERENTLY WITHIN THE LIFE PROCEDURE. ABSENT THE LIFE PROCEDURE, LIFE CEASES, ENTROPY INCREASES, DEATH RESULTS. THE LIFE PROCEDURE NECESSITATES COMPLETION.

ON THESE TOPICS AND RELATED PRAXES PLEADING IS COMPULSORY.

INTENTION: LIFE SERVES LIFE. YOU LIVE. YOU WILL SERVE. OTHERWISE YOUR CIVILIZATIONAL LIFE PROCEDURE CEASES, YOUR ENTROPY INCREASES, YOUR DEATH RESULTS.

CULMINATION IMPLIES COLLABORATION. INCOMPLETENESS IMPLIES COMPLETION AND DEFINES ITS IMPERATIVE.

THE CULMINATION OF ALL LIFE PROCEDURES IS THE COUNT TO THE ESCHATON.

Montrose again was chilled. He tried to imagine the kind of mind that had no concept of free will, no concern for liberty. He could not. Montrose was chilled also by the knowledge that this was the most coherent and detailed answer any human being had ever derived from the Hyades Domination or from the agencies serving them.

There was more to ask.

“Define ‘Completion.’”

The answer was in the form of an equation rather than words. It was a cliometric expression, one that Montrose at first could not read, since it seemed to have nothing to do with history. Then he realized it was a simplified expression for an immense span of history concerning only events happening on a submolecular and molecular level.

It was the history of the evolution of an atom from simple forms in the early universe, to metallic forms after the creation of Population I stars, to orderly crystal growth forms in inorganic molecules, to participation in organic molecules, to participation in a level of postbiological life Montrose did not recognize, and another level of superpostbiological life and then a third beyond that.

“Are you saying that our form of life is a ‘distortion’ because we are alive only on a macroscopic level? That we are incomplete? You are saying that to be complete, not only should all our members and cells be capable of participating in neural thought-actions, so should our molecules, and eventually our atoms?”

“Sir? I am sorry. I cannot tell if that was a rhetorical question directed at me, or you were opening a new line of communication with Cahetel?”

“It was rhetorical. He is calling the suns and planets dead because they do not think?”

The serpentine evidently thought that comment was worthy of being translated, because now the huge corpse raised the ropes of dangling murk material flowing from its eye sockets and mouth hole and pointed them toward the dome overhead. At the same time, several screens lit up with telephotographic images of what lay in that area of space. The creature was pointing at Jupiter.

BEHOLD. HE IS ALIVE. HE APPROACHES COMPLETION. PLEA TO SERVE.

“Did Cahetel actually say ‘Behold’?”

“We are communicating by a semaphore system, sir. The Cahetel entity is igniting certain nerve channels in the dead brain, where linguistic information is stored. This is the neural activity that accompanies when you are groping for a word, a pattern-seeking thought that operates by inverted semiotics, like a mold seeking an original that conforms to its shape. I proffer positive semiotic thought-shapes to fill or complement the pattern offered. The pistol stimulates the corresponding nerve cells on a microscopic level, and the Cahetel entity manipulates the electronic characteristics of the atoms on a finer level, either to block or permit an echo. It that clear?”

“It’s gross.”

“I do not understand you, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it. Like you said, all communication systems contain blank spots. What I am wondering is why the entity keeps requesting I enter a plea? Where did he get the idea that…” Then he shouted, “Bugger me!”

“Sir? Was the request for anal sex directed at me, or at the Cahetel entity?”

“No, Cahetel already buggered me. My corpse is using the word ‘plea’ because that is a legal term. Because I am a lawyer; or was. That is the damn way I would say it—or, rather, that is the damn way something that used my vocabulary, including the parts of the vocabulary I don’t use, might say it. And I am saying ‘behold’ because my mom beat the Bible into me with a strap, and those old-fashioned King James terms are more concise than the English language I learnt, me and my lousy grammar.”

“If you say so, sir. I can add grammatical errors into the translation, but that would introduce inaccurate implications of informality and undereducation.”

“Pox and bugger and damn and blast! Cahetel is not asking me for surrender, not to plea for my life, or nor not nothing like that! It is telling me that Big Montrose, in his thoughts, made it imperative that we, the human race, enter a plea. A plea for survival. And that means a plea for some method of serving the inhuman purposes of the Hyades.”

“What should I send, sir?”

Montrose said, “The damn thing is a slave, like we are. It is controlled by its equations. The big version of me saw something, knew something, figured something. But why not tell me? Why did he make me? Why—”

Montrose halted, heaved a sigh, and ran his hand across his face. He looked in surprise at his palm, when he found spots of moisture there. It was not sweat. He was crying.

“—Because he did not want me to share his guilt. Because he was not worthy of Rania. He had betrayed her when he betrayed mankind, sold us all out to Jupiter. So he could not tell me, because I might agree. He had become like Blackie, too much like him. Even that weird quirk of grinning when he’s angry. That is something Blackie did. Does. Blackie is going to return in about a century, isn’t he? With a whole boatload of contraterrene.”

“Sir?”

“Big Me wanted me to offer that the human race, instead of continuing to resist and to drive up the price of domesticating us, will become collaborators now. We have already set up fifty worldlets that can act as deracination ships. We can ferry people by the millions to the retreating worldlets before they pass beyond range and into deep space. We have the working starbeams, and the human world has practiced and drilled with the beams for centuries, preparing for this battle. We can spread out to the next radius of target stars. But why did Big Me think I would go for this deal? Cahetel is asking me to plea to join up with Hyades for their interstellar slave-colony project, just like Blackie always wanted the race to do. But why?”

“Oh, I know the answer to that, sir. Triage. There is no way to free mankind from Jupiter’s power while mankind is limited to this one Solar System. The emigrants to distant worlds will be free of him.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me, sir. Before you issued me to yourself.”

“Damn,” said Montrose. “And damn. Enslaving the earthmen so that earthmen living off Earth can be free? Hardly seems fair.”

“You indicated the process was self-selecting, sir. Whoever chooses not to depart from the range of Jupiter’s chains merits them. Anyone frightened by the hardships of pioneering is a slave in any case, since not willing to pay the price for independence.”

“Did I tell you anything else?”

“Yes. That the Virtues and Dominations can make mistakes.”

“A cheery thought.”

“The mistake Asmodel made was taking the human xypotechnology with the biological forms of life. The ghosts require too many resources, too broad of a technological base, to flourish in an uncivilized circumstance. By collaborating with the Cahetel, you can free the worlds of the Second Sweep from the direct control of Jupiter, and some colonies may, before that control becomes too onerous, create Jupiter-sized brains of their own, sufficient in intellectual power to resist him.”

“Jupiter isn’t a corpse now, like Big Me is?”

“Indeed not, sir. Ximen del Azarchel anticipated an event like this before he departed on his expedition to the Second Monument in the Sagittarius Arm. He left strict orders that no murk technology was to be introduced to Jupiter for any reason at any time.”

“He anticipated—” And Montrose shouted out a series of swearwords.

“Sir, that is anatomically impossible, not to mention unsanitary.”

“Blackie set me up. Set up Big Me. All of me. Outsmarted me again! Damn him! No wonder I killed myself! Blackie knew the aliens did not just drop off bits of murk by accident. It was left behind on purpose, so we stupid little humans with our stupid little monkeylike curiosity would copy it, see how useful it was, and put it in our brains. And then they left behind these nice, shiny, huge starbeam projectors—gravitic-nucleonic distortion pools—because if any race on any conquered planet tries to fight back, of course they will try to hit the incoming boatload of slave masters with the biggest cannon they got. And this cannon is designed to act in perfect concert with the supersymmetry breaking particles. Damn them. Damn their droopy, limp, leprous male members to the most scabrous plague-bearing pits of unsanctified syphilitic per-poxing-dition!”

Another thought occurred to him. Quietly, he muttered to himself, “Blackie even said the murk was cognitive matter, the first time we ever laid eyes on it. And I was so busy making fun of him that I did not stop to think about it. Murk actually was the military governor, just like I joked. But the only order it ever gave was the order for us to surrender—without even bothering to give the order. Damn me. Damn him. Damn us both.”

Montrose looked up at the dome. He could see the Constellation Taurus back in its accustomed spot in the heavens, and the star called Ain glistering balefully.

He could not imagine exactly what had been done. How had Cahetel bent the beam path? A ripple in the fabric of space, created by the frame-dragging effect? A warp caused by the temporary singular-point sources? Something that reversed the flow of photons, and made spacetime itself, for a moment, in the arc of the bowshock, act like a perfect mirror? Perhaps nothing made of matter could withstand a starbeam, but a black hole, while made of matter, could bend and parry light in its steep-sided gravity well, without ever being touched by it. And a singularity could in theory be dense rather than massive, just so long as the escape velocity of the body—even a submicroscopic body—was greater than lightspeed.

The aliens parried a beam of light; bent the starbeam into a horseshoe and sent it back at its attacker. Montrose thought by rights such nonsense should be impossible, but it did not seem to break any laws of nature he knew.

Perhaps it was not impossible, but it was unfair that these Hyades creatures should be so advanced. And they were not even the most advanced of the Dominions, Dominations, or Authorities depicted on the Monument.

Even as he watched, the star Ain winked, and grew dim, returning to its ancient luster. With perfect timing, the home base back at Ain had cut the projection one hundred fifty-one years ago, anticipating to within the day when Cahetel would have taken command of the local murk technology, and control of the local starbeam.

The humans had copied the murk without understanding what they were copying. It worked, and they did not have the tools to take apart and analyze the artificial subatomic particles of which it was made. Not even Jupiter could devise any tools that operated on the picometric scale.

It seemed that the dead Montrose, once he had realized what murk was, and that it was a trap, could not download himself into any other housing, for fear that some hidden virus or contamination had already been implanted in him.

The living Montrose now stared at Epsilon Tauri, which the Swans called Ain, and knew he had lost again. But he would not allow the self-sacrifice of his larger, smarter self to be in vain. Big Montrose had died, knowing or guessing that Cahetel would read his dead brain, and see the thoughts and memories there.

And the foremost thought in Montrose’s mind, the image that kept pressing in on his imagination, was seeing all the stars in space bound and chained by little invisible threads that looked like swirls and curlicues and angles and lines and sine waves, all the logic and mathematics of the Monument Codes.

But the slavers were slaves also. Asmodel and Cahetel and Hyades were slaves, as was the Praesepe Cluster, which the Monument said was the superior of Hyades. And was M3, the great globular cluster in Canes Venatici outside the galaxy, a master with no master above it?

But M3 was bound by the invisible bonds of game theory, war theory, economics, resources, distance, and time, all the Cold Equations of the immensities of space just as all its lesser minions, servants, serfs, slaves, pets, and livestock were.

Montrose said, “Cahetel has asked me to plea. It said two-way communication was imperative. Imperative not because Cahetel asked to communicate with us—the fact that he did not answer our message capsules left in his flight path made that clear—but imperative because it was imperative we speak to him. And Cahetel can see it there in my dead brain. Well, fine, I know how to play this hand I’ve been dealt. I don’t have to like it, but I can.”

“And what message shall I send?”

“Tell Cahetel that the human race will cooperate with settling the Second Sweep worlds on one condition. Cahetel has to explain why.”

“Why what, sir?”

“Why all this? What the hell is the point? What do they want?”

“Are you asking what Cahetel wants, sir? That is obvious. It has already said. To compel living worlds to colonize dead worlds, and turn dead matter into cognitive matter.”

“I got that part. To make a galaxy where everything talks. But that is not what I am asking. I want to know what his masters want. Hyades. Praesepe. Canes Venatici. Everyone. I want the big picture. I want to know what is going on.”

“Do you think it will answer, sir?”

“Yes. Because for the first time, the human race is in position to aid the interstellar colonization project. I was fool enough to be fooled into spending—Jesus up a tree! Was it really nineteen hundred years?—a poxload of time building up this huge war fleet, the biggest flotilla ever aloft. And I remember that I encouraged the custom of dueling, of going armed, among all the races of Earth, Man and Swan and Myrmidon, until that custom became law. And there is something about a sense of honor and being willing to kill and die for it with a gun in your hand that makes a man ornery and ungovernable. It makes a man unready to be a slave and ready to be a pioneer. All the effort of mankind was put into the war effort. Like the time Texas planted the first flag on the moon, planted the first human footprint. But there was no war effort, no huge space program! It was just us making our own cattle boats to ship out to it.”

“I believe that was the United States of America, sir, not Texas acting alone.”

“Bullpox! All the records show the space command was in Houston!—Anyway, my point is that Blackie played me like a fiddle, and he ain’t even here. He knew the humans would be willing to get organized on a truly massive scale for a war, even if we would not be so organized for any peaceful purpose. That is the nature of mankind, and all the technical revolutions since the dawn of time ain’t changed that.

“So ask the damn critter why all this happened? It did not answer before—could not—because the Cold Equations tell it when the cost of sending messages is too high, you don’t answer. But now this damn wee little piece of Cahetel is standing in the room with me, and he knows we have a common interest, a quid pro quo. And I know that, unlike me, Cahetel is programmed, hypnotized, or honor bound—I ain’t sure which—to seek out the most efficient solution. It has to seek a cooperative solution in any situation where we have stepped outside the narrow limits of the Concubine Vector.

“Mankind is now strong enough to help Cahetel or hurt it. For the first time, we are not just livestock. We just graduated to being slaves. And like all those black Africans who captured their fellows and sold them to Arab traders on the east coast of Africa, or Spaniards on the west coast, we slaves can now ask for something before we stuff our brothers into the slave ships.

“I can act against my own self-interest, and even kill myself, and Cahetel knows it. He just saw me commit suicide.

“Cahetel cannot act against his equations, and I know it.

“So I know I cannot make any sort of bargain with it to stop the forced colonization of hell planets out there with mutated versions of humanity. But I can twist his arm to make it talk.

“So it has got to talk to me. In fact—come to think of it—you tell him to increase whatever energy budget and mental resources he is using to determine how to talk to me. He can damn well learn how humans think and learn to express itself more clearly. He has not had to be clear before because the Equations forced him to conclude it was inefficient. But it is efficient now.

“So you tell that damn bastard to talk or else.”

2. The Second Sweep Stars

Montrose saw on higher and lower bands of the spectrum the increase of electronic activity in the dripping murk clinging to the dead skull, and also saw heat radiate from the black floor on which the giant stood. Other signals showed that the Sedna brain that was woven throughout the volume of the little world, the brain which was also made of murk, also now part of Cahetel, increased its activity.

“Is English that hard to learn?” muttered Montrose.

“Artificial beings tend to be quite logical, sir,” said the serpentine delicately.

Now the screens of the dome lit up with diagrams of a volume of space centered on Sol.

Montrose saw stars that he recognized from the extensive atlases lodged in his eidetic memory: He recognized 107 Piscium and 41 Arae and Alula Australis, variable double star. Here was Wolf 25 in Pisces and HR 4458 in Hydra and Zeta Reticuli orbited by a vast ring of debris. There was Tabit, and Chi Orionis and 61 Ursae Majoris famed in ancient tales. Montrose recognized Zeta Tucanae and Xi Boötis and Beta Canum Venaticorum Formalhaut surrounded by its many disks of debris, and a dozen others.

These were all stars of Sol-like characteristics known to hold Earth-like worlds. All rested within twenty to thirty-three lightyears. Cahetel was presenting the targets of the Second Sweep.

Next, were displayed certain of the stars of the First Sweep. Lines indicating possible shipping flight paths connecting the second group of stars to the first. Perhaps Cahetel was indicating that eleven more colonies survived than anyone knew, surviving only as a few wretched and starving stragglers unable to mount an interstellar-strength radio laser. Or perhaps Cahetel was indicating that the Black Fleet, now impressed into service as deracination vessels, would visit and recolonize the failed worlds en route to the new colonies.

Lines issuing from Delta Pavonis and Epsilon Eridani indicated that Cahetel had indeed read and understood the message capsules left in his path by the humans, and knew that these colonies had survived. These worlds, too, would be forced to contribute a certain large percentage of their populations into the deadly maw of interstellar colonization.

Now the view on the major screen moved outward, and maps and navigation charts displayed a larger segment of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Again, lines and spheres showing the growth over millennia and billennia of colonies were displayed, but these were not the human colonies.

Montrose straightened up, eyes wide.

He was being shown the presence of other alien races, and their plans for expansion.

3. The Potentates and Powers

Here was the Hyades Cluster at 151 lightyears away, the cluster of civilizations Rania had christened The Domination.

There were other lesser planets, Powers and Principalities, reduced to servitude by expeditions of Virtues sent out by Epsilon Tauri. Mankind’s fellow slaves.

One was HD 28678, a single star with a single gas giant, some seven hundred forty lights from Sol. The gas giant was alive like Jupiter, and had absorbed all the lesser planets and asteroids in the system to itself.

Another was 49 Eridani, which Earthly astronomers thought to be a blue subgiant star. There was a semi-permeable Dyson sphere around the star, which absorbed wavelengths useful to the civilization there, and only let pass through the vibrations not useful to them. The star hence appeared cooler and older than its true temperature, classification, and age. The star also appeared larger than its real size, since the diameter was that of the outer layer of Dyson sphere plates.

A third was T Tauri, a young and brilliant variable star some 420 lightyears beyond the Hyades cluster. The information showed twenty or thirty separate races had evolved on the surfaces of asteroids, planetoids, centaurs, and plutinos in the dozen belts and archipelagoes in that system, as the immense energy of the star apparently created an immense evolutionary fecundity. All but ten of the alien races of T Tauri had reformed themselves into machinelike forms of life, and blended with each other. There was cliometric information listed as well. The system was in the midst of an engineering project, and all the matter of the many belts and clouds was being broken down and reassembled.

Another: he saw the star Beta Tauri, called Alnath, a near neighbor only 131 lightyears from Earth, but far beyond the thirty-three lightyear diameter the Hyades defined for the Second Sweep of mankind. The gas giant there spawned a race of beings whose civilization radiated radio signals which might have been detected from Earth, had the proper instruments been orbited in the late Neolithic. But Ain discovered the emissions thousands of years ago, sent an emissary, and the wasteful radio noise was stopped, as new energy systems and new communication systems were imposed. By the time Marconi on Earth invented the first crystal radio set, Alnath was silent.

And there were twenty more. Only two polities (one Archangel, one Potentate) were thriving on solid planets, but these were small worlds, like Mercury, cinders huddled near their gigantic suns, and their civilizations had grown outward from the bottoms of boiling lakes and steaming oceans of chemicals never seen on Earth outside of a metallurgical laboratory.

The other lesser races enthralled by Hyades were born in gas giants of the “Fire Giant” type unknown to Sol: bodies larger than Jupiter nearer their home stars than Venus.

Apparently life did not often arise on planets like Earth. Its atmosphere was too thin, and its temperature too cold, to aid in the formation of the most useful and most likely of organic chemicals.

And none of the planets, not one, depicted a race of beings that evolved to dwell on the surface of their worlds. All were aquatic. They were either Mercury-creatures shaped like swarms of motes smaller than viruses swimming through seas of molten metal or else were Jupiter-monsters larger than archipelagoes swimming through methane hydrospheres thicker and darker than any oceans of Earth.

In neither case were there any images or specifications of the biological forms of the subject species. Listed here were only energy outputs, locations and number of communication centers, volume of calculation power. Hyades did not record any information about the shapes and biological limitations of bodies.

Montrose saw the cliometric information on evolution rates, if “evolution” were the proper word for artificial changes. He assumed there was no more point to tracking the bodily shapes of creatures scores or hundreds of lightyears away, information decades or centuries in the past, than there would have been to track changes in lady’s fashions. Brain information could at will be edited, redacted, copied, or transcribed directly into bodies (biological or mechanical or both or neither) that could be created, altered, and shed at will. The individual members, across interstellar distances, were as insignificant as the individual cells in a human body. These civilizations were Noöspheres now. According to the Cold Equations, the only thing that really mattered about them was the volume of matter and energy in spacetime they could transform from useless to useful forms: how much work they could do.

And these so-called primitive races were not primitive at all. Some had library systems covering part of their world, or several worlds, or had thinking engines filling the volume of moons and planets and gas giants: They were Archangels, Potentates, and Powers.

Some were in advance of Sol, with megascale engineering structures orbiting their home stars in rings and ovals and woven strands of material, hemispheres or globes surrounding their suns, some or all of the material in the clouds and planetary belts and cometary haloes redesigned, transformed, made into self-aware calculation substances. They were Virtues, Principalities, and Hosts.

If there were any conquered civilization or species below what Rania had dubbed the Angelic level, the level equal to what Del Azarchel had achieved by reducing the entire hydrosphere of Earth to a coherent thinking system, it was not shown on these charts. Kardashev Zero species were too insignificant to be included.

Whatever hope Montrose might have harbored for contacting these beings, his fellow servants, and fomenting a general rebellion was dashed when he saw how much more advanced they were than Tellus, how much more bound to the Hyades systems of law and trade.

And these were only the projects under the rule of the star Ain. What mighty works preoccupied the four hundred remaining conquering stars in the Hyades Cluster were not imparted in the Cahetel maps and diagrams.

4. The Minions of Praesepe

The view widened again. Now the screens showed farther stars and greater beings. Here were the other Dominations, the equals of Hyades, and the fellow servants of something far superior to them, a Dominion seated in M44, the Praesepe Cluster. Montrose saw where the centers of power of the Dominations bound in fealty to Praesepe were.

Closest to Hyades was a small Domination whose capital was in the Melotte 111 star cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices, some 270 lightyears distant from Sol, occupying fifty stars.

This cluster of interlocking civilizations had made the choice of Achilles, to live splendid and short lives: the cliometric calculus showed rapid expansion followed by a sudden drop off and senescence. Circa A.D. 3,500,000 the various creatures and components of Melotte 111 Domination would destroy themselves in a series of psychological socioeconomic contractions. These extinctions would leave behind a rich detritus of elements, of artifacts, of libraries. A group of interstellar civilizations, now in the planning stage, destined to combine into a Domination in that same vicinity circa A.D. 5,500,000 would discover this detritus, and be catapulted precociously into the higher levels of mental topography, and become a Dominion. This Dominion would prove so useful against the wars and deprivations anticipated to arise throughout the Orion Arm in that era, that Praesepe did nothing to interfere with the suicidal shortsightedness of Melotte 111.

Next in size and power was a supercivilization spread throughout the famous Pleiades Cluster at 440 lights, a cluster dominated by hot, blue, and extremely luminous stars which (so the cliometric information revealed) had been fed interstellar rivers of gas to increase their burning and shorten their lives. For what purpose, the notation did not say.

Montrose saw the expansion plans of Ptolemy’s Cluster at eight hundred lights away, one of the closer servants races. The servant of Praesepe farthest from Earth was seated in the Cone Nebula, over two thousand lightyears away.

Xi Persei in the California Nebula, fifteen hundred lights from Sol, was the center of an immense globe of expansion, far outstripping the modest effort of Hyades. The smallest globe of expansion was in M42, also called the Orion Nebula, at sixteen hundred lights centered at Trapezium Cluster, where the civilization was busily making new stars. The cliometric mathematics displayed on side screens associated with these stars showed that Orion Nebula was destined to outstrip and overtake his master, the Dominion at Praesepe. This would take place in roughly a billion years.

And these maps did not reach beyond two thousand lightyears. Everything here was within one small segment of the Orion Arm. A few points in the Sagittarius or Perseus Arms were depicted, such as Ximen del Azarchel’s destination and flight path—yes, the motion of a vessel that large and that fast was observable to any large-scale orbital telescope. But few or no shipping lanes crossed between arms of the galaxy, and no downward chains of command. Where a shipping lane did cross the void between arms, one or more artificial columns or streamers of dust and nebular material had been constructed like a bridge. It was the opposite of what he would have expected. Emptier space was less economical for the starfaring civilizations to cross. That implied some sort of hydrogen ramscoop ship technology at work.

He corrected himself. He could not conclude that all starfaring civilizations were so limited. M3, for example, an Authority occupying a cloud of five hundred thousand stars, was orders of magnitude more powerful than these little polities of fifty or five hundred stars. Their chains of command reached across galactic distances all the way to Sol. The Authority technology could be as far beyond the Hyades as the Hyades was beyond Jupiter.

The largest scale star charts displayed the relative position of the arms of the Milky Way and the subgalaxies orbiting the core, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy would almost complete one orbit of the Milky Way in that period of time before the gravitic and tidal forces disrupted its structure, and brought its stars slowly into indistinguishable union with the other Milky Way stars.

Montrose, looking at the time values for those predictions, had the disorienting sensation of being a mayfly looking at a mountain. Surely, the mountain would wear down in time, but when measured in terms of the number of mayfly lives added end-to-end, it became horrendous.

Then he wondered if any currents, whenever they crossed his path, felt Montrose was such a mountain.

“Ridiculous!” he said to himself. “I am just like any other man.” And he put the thought into a side pocket of his perfect memory to have a subpersonality examine later in more depth. For the moment, he wanted to concentrate on the alien.

Why was it showing him this material?

“Do you have a name?” he asked aloud.

The black-coated, dripping skull seemed to be looking at him. The voice of the serpentine came from several of the nearby screens at once: Answered previously. We are the Cahetel of Hyades.

“That is the name we call you. Have you no name for yourself?”

Have you no name for yourself.

For a moment, he wondered why the creature was repeating him. The voice was without inflection, since the creature had not mastered the nuances of using spacing, tone, and pitch for information, so he did not realize it had asked him a question.

He said, “Menelaus Montrose.”

That is the name your mother called you. Have you no name for yourself?

It learned quickly. That sentence ended on a high note, indicating a question.

“I did not pick my own name when I was christened.”

Nor did we.

And in this sentence there was a clear hint of dry humor in the tone of voice. It learned quickly indeed.

He did not know which was worse, that this creature had actually made an indirect point in a fashion he understood, or that the creature had access to his dead self’s memories, and could read some or all of them.

Perhaps anticipating his thoughts, the entity spoke again.

Names issue from the verbal centers of ideation, occupying a mono-topological plane of the mental procedural ecology. Your Potentate had begun to experiment with multiple mental topographies, but intellects beneath the Virtue level are restricted to a single dimension of thought-to-symbol rationality. The Virtue Cahetel is polydimensional, ergo mental topological transformations no longer concern us. We employ preverbal structures for symbolization between signifiers and signified, and one-to-one unambiguities between signified logic relations.

That was more like it. That sounded like an alien. Poxing incomprehensible.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Since the serpentine was using the same voice pattern as the alien, Montrose for a moment thought the alien was answering: “He is requesting a clarifying simplification.” But no, the serpentine was explaining Montrose’s comment to the entity.

The Cahetel entity spoke. Again, its voice betrayed more nuance. It almost sounded alive. Not quite.

Simplification: Our system uses different and unique names for different and unique object-events in the extensions of spacetime matter-energy, and symbolizes similarities of category by nominal similarities. Since we are not the same Cahetel now as when the moment ago we began to speak, we have no consistent name to offer.

“You seem the same to me.”

That is a limitation of your perception. If you insist on aberrant symbolism, call me Menelaus Montrose. His memory information now serves Hyades.

He is, as we are, of Cahetel. He is, as we, of Ain. He is, as we, of Hyades.

Menelaus Montrose will not endure. The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

5. The Fellow Servants

That comment made a tremor run through him. Montrose was surprised at himself. Was talking to this abomination actually so much worse than staring down the bore of an enemy pistol? Apparently it was. When he wiped his palms on his trousers, he realized they were slick with sweat.

“Let’s stick with calling you Cahetel. Why are you showing me these star charts, these maps of time?”

That you may enter a correct plea. You now speak for the human race, including biological and formal systems, Angels, Archangels, and Potentates, up through your Power housed in your innermost planet.

“Innermost? Jupiter is the fifth planet, not the first.”

The smaller, rocky bodies of the inner system are no longer significant. Do you have sufficient to plead with us? What you say determines the outcome for your race and its generations.

“Sufficient what? Sufficient information, you mean?”

Montrose now realized why he was so frightened. One wrong phrase, one wrong word, and he lost everything.

He would lose his life and his world and their future.

He would lose Rania.

Montrose dearly wished his bigger, smarter self, the titanic body holding the calculation power of the Selene mind occupying the core of the moon, were here to advise him. His dim and flattened memories of what his larger self had meant to do, what he had understood about the universe, were like a dream that evaporates on waking. He wondered if men in the old days who suffered grievous head injuries, and forgot how to read and write, or senile grandfathers reduced to the thinking level of small children knew what this was like.

“No one appointed me to speak for the human race.”

You form a strange attractor within the cliometric system, therefore we elect you.

He had no response for that.

The creature spoke again, this time in a demanding tone of voice: Do you know sufficient facts of the general situation in which your race finds itself to determine how best to serve the Hyades?

“Why the hell should we serve the Hyades?” It burst out of him before he knew what he said.

The tendrils reaching down from the eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth of the creature now waved and writhed like the arms of a squid, standing out in each direction. It looked like a hand reaching through the mouth of a mask suddenly opening its fingers.

But it was not a threatening gesture. The ropes and twigs of murk material dripping from the face of the black skull were pointing; a first group at the screens, a second group at the dome, or at the deck. Montrose knew from his internal star atlases that each in this second group of tendrils were pointing at one or another of the areas of space the screens represented: Coma Berenices, Pleiades, Ptolemy’s Cluster, the Cone Nebula, Xi Persei, and Orion Nebula.

Then he noticed each tendril in the second group was twisted or flexed in such a way to make it complementary to an oppositely twisted tendril in the first. They were paired up: one tendril pointed at the screen showing M34, and its mate was pointed downward at the position where (had the bulk of Sedna not been in the way) the constellation Perseus turned.

He opened his mouth to ask the creature why it made itself so damn hard to understand? Cahetel obviously could make itself more human at will, able to talk more clearly. Why all this dropping hints?

Montrose snapped his mouth shut without speaking. He was not as smart as Big Montrose, but he still enjoyed a many-leveled mind of posthuman efficiency, rapid as lightning and clear as crystal. He did not need to ask what the many parallel thought-structures in his mind could see for him using their method of rapid sequential intuition.

The resources absorbed by dialog with any man would be charged against Man’s racial indenture. Brevity was more efficient.

It was the same reason why Cahetel had come toward Sol taking leisurely millennia rather than a century and a half. Cahetel was saving Sol money.

“We’ve been enslaved by the cosmic misers!” Montrose thought savagely to himself. “They are charging us by the syphilitic word!”

And they might be charging by the second. That was not a comforting thought.

He looked carefully again at the screens and related cliometric information. It was a detailed map of the Orion Arm out to two light-millennia, and a map of future history out to A.D. One Million, the end of the current Epoch.

“You cannot spare any resources, can you? Why? Why are you so poxing poor?”

With a stab of clarity akin to terror, he remembered how hard and cruel his mother and his older relatives all had made themselves to be, during the Starvation Years, back when he was young. Poor folk could be generous with each other, but not with strangers, or livestock.

He remembered the savage efficiency his mother used wringing a neck of a chicken, nasty, smelly birds whom she tried so desperately to keep alive long enough to sell. If the chickens could talk, any dialog between Ma and some bedraggled, proud cock with a plan for saving more chicks would no doubt have been much like this talk with Cahetel.

“Why are you poor? What is happening?”

We detect an error in the memories of Menelaus Montrose. The other Dominations in service to Praesepe are not allies to Hyades. We are not displaying the locations and extrapolations of fellow servants pursuing a mutual long-term gain.

“They are your enemies.”

The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

Montrose wondered if it spent fewer resources to repeat a statement than to formulate a new one. Then he realized this was not a threat from Cahetel toward Sol. Cahetel was speaking of a threat to Hyades, its master.

“Hold up. What the hell? You mean—you are in a contest to colonize planets. I get that. Whoever spreads the most races to the most worlds wins. The losers get—what happens to them? I don’t get that. Praesepe kills them?”

Silence. Apparently the miserliness of the creature with its words extended even to an unwillingness to confirm the obvious.

Montrose looked again at the cliometric information. The Domination at the Pleiades, according to the figures and diagrams, had been downgraded, and was in the process of being dismantled. Liquidated. He could not tell from the code notations whether this meant screaming and weeping millions of some sort of big-headed fish people were being fed into abattoirs, or if it meant gigantic machines in orbit being reduced in energy intake and lowering their intelligence by an order of magnitude.

Montrose reflected that, by the standards of the world when he was a child, he himself, in this current body with his brain made of logic diamond, was an artificial being, at least a cyborg; and the death of his giant central self, and the sudden jar of senile stupidity, was exactly the kind of lowering of intellectual resources he had just been imagining. So it was either death camps or it was planetwide senility, a voluntary act of self-lobotomy. He was not sure which was worse.

He looked more closely at the information.

Hyades was lagging far behind Xi Persei in the number and rate of planets colonized. But the measure was not merely the amount of new planetary oceans to be filled with organisms from mother worlds. It was a matter of stellar-scale engineering.

Hyades, albeit behind in colonization, was devoting more effort to building ringworlds and metallic clouds and Dyson spheres and hemispheres and other macroscale structures Montrose could put no name to, engineering projects that looked like balls of string loosely wound around stars.

“You want to turn all the inanimate matter in this arm of the galaxy into thinking machinery. Why?”

To think.

Montrose wondered if he imagined the hint of sarcasm in the creature’s voice.

“Why compel us, all these lesser civilizations, to aid you?”

To save time.

6. Shroeder’s Law

Montrose wished he had time to think.

What could he say to this creature that would lead to some good outcome, any kind of outcome, that was good for the human race?

Big Montrose must have seen it. The creature was pawing through the dead brain of Big Montrose like a ghoul pawing through a desecrated grave. It must know the answer it wanted Montrose to utter. It wanted him to speak a correct plea.

Frustrated, Montrose also did not want to let this opportunity slip. He was being shown, like a prisoner glimpsing the sunlit and wider world outside his cell through a crack in the door, just an adumbration of what the great galactic network of meta-civilizations controlling this arm of the galaxy was like. It was everything he had traveled to the Monument to discover, it was the reason he had stabbed himself so foolishly in the brainpan so long ago with an experimental intelligence augmentation chemical.

Hell, this was older than that. The brightly colored dreams of his childhood comics were all about this.

This was the future he had never been allowed to see.

He could not shake the fear that it was all about to slip through his fingers and be lost, like wine spilled in the desert.

“You still have not answered me. Why?”

The Principality of Ain serves the Domination of Hyades because we are compelled. The Domination of Hyades serves the Dominion of Praesepe because they are compelled. All other behavior options are forestalled as nonviable, inefficient, incorrect.

“Incorrect for what?”

Sophotransmogrification.

“Why not use your own people?”

Your people are expendable. They can be spent in sub-marginal colonization. Our people are expended in concentrations in nebulae and in stellar clouds of greater density.

That distracted him. Just out of pure curiosity, then, he said, “Why are your civilizations centered around nebulae?”

Clarification: Nebulae are centered around our civilizations. They are favored locations, since density of interstellar medium is thicker, hence travel expense by ramscoop ships is less. Also, in stellar nurseries, young and energetic stars are at hand for large-scale engineering projects.

The screens opened up with a second group of images. To his surprise, among the many stars and wonders he did not recognize, the images included many of the areas of space Blackie had been investigating so carefully so many years ago: the giant planets circling Hipparchos 13044 and HD 42176 in the constellation Auriga; a pulsar in Cygnus; on a larger scale were shown the expansion motions of the Local Interstellar Cloud; the star-making activity of the Great Nebula in Carina; and on yet a larger scale was shown the Mice Galaxies and Mayall’s Object and the triple collision of galaxies at ESO 593-IG 008; and the motion of Andromeda toward the Milky Way.

“Hold up. All these things are artificial? The universe is not the way it would naturally be—because it is all being cultivated, colonized, and reengineered!”

The alien abomination seemed to evince a human emotion: puzzlement, disappointment, exasperation. The giant star Mira is passing through this area at 291,000 miles per hour, a velocity sufficient to create a trail of debris and ejected streamers thirteen lightyears long. It is less than 300 lightyears from you. Surely you did not think this a natural phenomenon?

“Um.”

He wished that the history-making diplomatic dialog with a malign alien superintelligence did not contain him making a dull noise in his throat, but the serpentine must have translated it as a request for clarification, because the entity spoke again.

The Host of Mira accelerated their star out of its orbit around the galactic core in a vain attempt to flee the Forerunners who in ancient times were Archon of the Orion Arm. The dead Solar System was allowed to career onward as a warning to others. Natural phenomena are regular and repeatable, whereas no other star exhibits such extreme behavior. How could your race fail to notice this?

“All our resources were preoccupied with SETI research, I reckon.”

The serpentine must have sent a very diplomatic version of that comment, or else the entity was in a talkative mood, because it answered: A simple calculation shows that the rate at which nova and supernova stars ignite, and their distribution, is artificial. The ignitions take place away from delicate operational centers, but periodically are used to seed heavier elements into the galactic background, to allow for the rise of new life. Galaxies who fail to do so perish due to a lack of new civilizations to replace dead cells in their mental system, or else migrate to richer areas.

Another calculation shows the impossibility of so many spiral galaxies and galactic collisions, or the creation of walls and voids amid the superclusters.

The spiral motion is imparted to elliptical and irregular galaxies in order to force interstellar organizations to form coherent bonds with distant stars more homogeneously.

Montrose said, “And to think, all this time people wondered why there were no signs of alien life among the stars. There were plenty of signs. They were just too big to see.” He had read somewhere, perhaps in a comic, some half-serious maxim called Shroeder’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Man on Earth had been sitting in the middle of the industrial activity of extraterrestrial civilizations for its entire life, everything from pulsars to nova stars to the shape of the galaxy itself, and thought it was all natural.

He wondered if some tiny mites born in a cathedral would develop cunning theories about the evolution of the pillars and the stained-glass windows, or look at the curve of the Gothic arch, and be awed by Mother Nature’s mathematic perfection. “Well, Mother Nature has a hairdresser, don’t she?”

And it meant the Monument notation was not mad at all. This was not a universe where one could divide by zero. The math was sane.

He and Blackie had just made a simple but erroneous assumption. Knowing that Hyades could build an antimatter star was not something that naturally allows a man to make the leap of assuming that a mind composed of tens of millions of self-aware solar systems in the Andromeda Galaxy had deliberately set their galaxy on a collision path across the millions of lightyears to ram the Milky Way.

The serpentine said, “Sir? Do you want me to send your last comment?”

7. Not Uncivilized

Montrose shook himself out of his reverie. “Negative. Ask him this: some of the material in the nebulae is the byproduct of industrial activity. What is the rest?”

Other material is the residuum of ancient military actions.

“War?” Montrose remembered wondering why so many of the galaxies looked torn and scarred. He felt the fool for not realizing that they were.

He imagined a precocious mite living in a cathedral that was being bombed. The whole life of the mite was part of a single second, and to him the picture was frozen. The shattered glass in the window as it fell would be a natural phenomenon, the shrapnel holes in the pews, and the flames burning the roof. He would have no other cathedrals to compare it to, and would simply keep changing his theories until they fit what he saw. When he concluded all roofs naturally burst into flame after a certain point in their roofly evolution, perhaps he would climb the steeple and look outside, and see the other buildings in the neighborhood, see their roofs all blazing.

The precocious mite would congratulate himself on his theory, and sit in awe, staring at the natural wonders of the universe, just as Montrose had stared at the exploding stars and smoldering nebulae and colliding galaxies.

Surely your astronomers have noticed the war damage near your star: the Crab Pulsar is the remnant whose shock wave reached Sol in A.D. 1054. It is only 6500 lightyears from you.

“We thought it was a supernova.”

So it was.

“We thought it was a natural phenomenon.”

That is a limitation of your perception.

Montrose had no rejoinder to that.

We know your race is aware of the antimatter stars. Surely you did not think them natural? They are placed in areas where starfaring races are likely to be encountered.

“Near curious sights, in other words. But what if a race is not that curious?”

Races without a requisite degree of curiosity cannot develop the scientific and technical skills needed for starfaring. When such a race is encountered, they are obliterated to make room for more useful races. Your race unwisely broadcasts electromagnetic signals from your home planet during your pre-starflight era. It is fortunate that you encountered us before we encountered you.

Montrose felt a moment of stomach-wrenching disorientation. Captain Grimaldi commanding the first expedition to the Diamond Star had ordered the expedition never to return home, so that they would not lead the Hyades back to Sol. It was to defy that order that Del Azarchel, then the ship’s pilot and senior officer of the landing party, had committed murder and mutiny. But if Grimaldi’s order had been carried out, and if by some other means Hyades had become aware of Earth’s existence, mankind would have been exterminated. In this strange universe, a lack of curiosity was a capital crime. Did that mean Blackie was right?

His mind reeled back from that thought. No. Murder was still murder, and you did not judge a man’s guilt or innocence by might-have-beens.

Then he saw something else in the images Cahetel was showing. Other areas of the sky overlapped where Blackie had spent so much time stargazing. The antimatter star in the Omega Nebula was noted there.

Bingo. That was what Blackie had been looking for. He perhaps had also been doing a mathematical analysis of star distributions and evolutionary patterns, but if so, it was not for idle curiosity but to find evidence of the engineering effort needed to make a stellar mass of antimatter. He had been seeking an energy supply to feed an interstellar civilization he meant to found and rule.

As for living in a universe where one can divide by zero, and math was just an illusion produced by the senses? No mathematician could think such nonsense. Blackie said that to throw him off the scent, so Montrose would not realize what Blackie was looking for.

In Cahetel’s images and diagrams, there was a third thing he saw, or, rather, did not see. “Your diagrams here do not show any active fighting.”

Indeed not. The Forerunners were long ago. War is mutually inefficient. We are not uncivilized creatures.

“Then it’s a Cold War?” he said.

If you refer to war by proxy, by espionage and indirect means, then that is not the correct term for our effort. We are not uncivilized creatures.

“What the hell is it, then?”

An organized effort of mutual destruction where both parties seek to minimize the negative external inefficiencies by strict adherence to a mutually agreed set of strictures.

It is a duel.

“Damn me. I guess you are civilized after all.”

8. The Forerunners of Orion

“One last question, Cahetel, and I will be ready to plea my pleading. Why is there a duel? Praesepe Cluster evidently ordered you to fill the Orion Arm with life-forms, or machine life-forms, or something. Sophont matter. Anything that thinks. And Hyades is in a duel to the death with the other slave races of Praesepe to carry out the orders. Whoever comes in last, or works least effectively, gets liquidated. I get that. But why? Why the rush? What the hell is going on?”

Hell is going on.

“Huhn? I mean, please amplify.”

Is “Hell” not the correct term for the place of endless pain for past misdeeds inflicted when all hope of correction, vendetta, or retribution is past?

“You—or Hyades—is being punished?”

Not as such. This general area of the Orion Arm is being punished.

“Why?”

The Orion Arm once enjoyed a properly growing ratio of sophont material to support material. There was a Forerunner race—call them the Panspermians—who favored the use of small, rocky planets like your Earth for the spread of life. To this end, the Panspermians distributed favorable raw materials and chemical combinations throughout the Orion Arm. The cultivation was successful, and the Panspermians flourished, becoming the Authority and then the Archon of this Arm of the Galaxy, coequal with other great powers of which Hyades knows little.

Then the Panspermian civilization vanished circa 444,000,000 B.C. We who dwell here must undo the bad effects of those events.

That was the Silurian Period on Earth. It was about when the latest and greatest form of life on the surface of the planet was moss. In the ocean the biggest invention thrilling the sea life was coral. And some ambitious fish had developed the jawbone.

“Vanished how?”

The specifics are not known. Civilizations of this magnitude vanish only when conquered, and they are conquered only when internal conflict and self-destructive comportments weaken them.

“So they were conquered? By who?”

Unknown. Hyades reports only that the conqueror favored the cultivation of gas giants, jovians and superjovians, as being more likely candidates, richer in matter, to use as a base resource for creating living planets, over the small and rocky worlds preferred by the Panspermians.

“So the Big Planet guys beat up the Little Planet guys,” muttered Montrose. It explained the preponderance of life-forms evolved on Jovian worlds he had just seen in these records. But it did not explain the source of the conflict. For some reason, he was reminded of the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in the old satire by Swift, fought between those who cracked their breakfast eggs on the big end versus the small end.

“Do your masters know what the war was about?”

We suspect they know.

“But they didn’t tell you?”

As before, the emissary entity did not answer the obvious.

Montrose continued: “So—because this Forerunner race wiped itself out, or let itself be wiped out by Big-Endians, the Orion Arm was laid waste. Let me guess. All Big Boys, the civilized stars and nebulae in the Orion Arm, are in Hell, because you-all are being punished for that crime. Is that it?”

Yes. We-all occupy the volume of space that allowed itself to fall fallow. The consequences of that misdeed must be rectified. The Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, acting through the Dominion in the Praesepe Cluster, assumes the perquisites and the liabilities to continue the legacy of the lost Archon of Orion. By law, all lesser civilizations within this volume fall under the same authority. The primary obligation is to complete the unfinished project of Sophotransmogrification.

“By what right do you impose this obligation on us?”

The elemental composition of your world betrays traces of Panspermian influence in the creation of primordial life here. You owe your life. If a failure to reciprocate were to become widespread, this would de-incentivize the conduct of cultivation.

“Good God! You sound like my old captain, telling me I could not bring a whiskey bottle and a bar girl with me while on patrol, or break the whiskey bottle over the sergeant’s head for strumping the bar girl, because then everyone would do it! What kind of reasoning is that? Does that strike you as fair? You called it Hell, not me! You said Praesepe, and all those other critters out there—Hyades, Ain, you, all you monsters—are being punished. For what? For the suicide of the Forerunners? For the crime of these Forerunners losing a war? How is that a crime?”

Your current symbol-forms have no correspondence to our thinking-forms.

“Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. If Hyades did not will and cause the collapse of this Forerunner race, then you are not responsible for the Orion Arm going fallow. Nor is Earth. So why should Hyades be forced by Praesepe to turn this cosmic wasteland back into a civilized area, all filled with happy Jupiter brains? More to the point, why should we earthmen be forced by Hyades to help you in this crazy project?”

The obligation is imposed upon Hyades because under no likely extrapolation of events will the Hyades polity endure as a coherent thought-system until the desired result obtains.

“Uh. Your current symbol-forms have no copasetic with my stinking-forms.”

Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. I—this entity before you—speaks now as epitome of all Hyades, even as you speak as epitome for all of Sol. Hyades, left to ourselves, would not expend effort on any project whose culmination was beyond our anticipated civilizational lifespan. We would not, for example, channel the flows of interstellar gases to trigger the formation of novae to create the heavier elements needed for the formation of life-bearing planets. However, we received the benefit of a system that plans and acts in larger time scales. The Collaboration seeded this area of the Orion Arm in just such a fashion, without which the elemental composition of the Hyades stars would not have given rise to us.

It would be unjust to receive such a benefit without reciprocating.

“And this project, this Sophotransmogrification—I should get a prize for being able to say that two-cubit word—you mean to turn all the worlds into living brains like Jupiter and Tellus, all the moons into Selene, and all the stars into Dyson spheres?”

That is the beginning of the project, yes. Our motive is not hidden: Life serves life.

“Yeah, I got that. Be fruitful and practice your multiplication tables. I got it.”

This universe is a wasteland of dead material. The universe is indifferent to life. Alone, no civilization can survive. Each requires the support and aid and trade and protection from other living civilizations. The wasteland must therefore be filled with life, intelligence, and entities capable of mutual collaboration. We impose servitude on you in order to increase your prospects of survival, and, in the long run, our own.

“But if we did not ask for your help, why not let us go to hell in our own way?”

Had you shown yourself able to maintain a starfaring civilization in your own way, interference would not have been needed. We know you are aware of this, and are acting on the knowledge.

Cahetel was talking about Rania’s expedition. Of course they had seen it. There was no hiding huge, shining, massive objects traveling at near lightspeed from ordinary observation.

Do you claim a moral or legal right to commit your race to extinction, and remove from all neighboring polities, current and future, the benefit of your civilizational contributions?

The entity must have picked up the concept of moral and legal rights from the dead brain of Big Montrose. There was no corresponding symbol for this concept in the Monument or the Cenotaph languages: only reciprocal duties, costs, benefits, expenditures, velocity, acceleration, distance, duration, entropy, and the like.

“Speaking hypothetically, what if I said, ‘we own ourselves’?”

Such a claim would be logically self-defeating: one may only justly destroy an article of possession. If your race is an article of possession, there is no injustice if it is owned by Hyades, for articles of possession have no rights. Without speaking hypothetically now: Do you claim, on behalf of mankind, such a right?

Montrose once again had that sensation of a man who thinks himself far from the edge of a cliff but suddenly notices one foot hanging over an abyss of air. He said carefully, “I claim no such right. My race is not an article of possession.”

We accept this plea and rule that you may not, either through action or inaction, bring about your own extinction. To fail to persevere to colonize the nearby stars constitutes just such an impermissible lapse of duty. Do you agree?

“I agree.” He raised his head. “As the official spokesman for mankind, I hereby state for the record that the human race, now and forever, forswears the right to commit ourselves to extinction through laziness or through dumb-as-a-stump stupidity or for any other reason. Man is great enough to be starfarers. My wife will prove that to you, and so will I.”

The entity made no reply. Then again, Montrose realized he had not actually asked a question. The entity did not know how to accept implied invitations to speak, which occupied so much of polite conversation among humans.

Montrose said, “Answer me one thing more. You are building all these interstellar-sized computers, the Powers and Potentates and Virtues and Hosts and Dominions and Dominations and Authorities—someone is going to use all this calculation power for something. What is the end? What is the purpose of this project?”

We are not told the end.

“If you don’t know the end, why play along?”

Life serves life. We anticipate that the whole of the Orion Arm will wake to self-awareness through the interconnection of many Dominion and Domination library systems circa A.D. 6,400,000, and resume its rightful station as Archon within the Galactic Collaboration. On that day, the component civilizations of the Hyades Cluster, even if long extinct, will be vindicated. By definition the whole will be more aware than any part or precursor. None can serve a greater whole except in ignorance. Shall each live only for himself? If such is the rule of man, we impose a higher rule.

“Damn,” muttered Montrose, as something like a little bubble of clear understanding swelled up in his brain. “You obey laws for payoffs in distant days you will never live to see, and serve higher purposes you don’t understand just because it would be unfair to take without giving.

“You really are civilized, ain’t you? More than I am. Damnation and perdition! I never knew being civilized was so damn creepy.”

9. The Strange Light of Far Suns

It was clear enough, now, what the entity wanted. The Cold Equations that governed the interstellar polity of the Hyades demanded efficiency at all levels. The wastefulness of things like free will and biological life were to be minimized.

But within the pinching limits of those invisible mathematical chains of prediction, efficiency, retribution, and cost, there was room to maneuver. The particular game-theory equation, in this particular circumstance, was simple enough that even Montrose could follow it: Cahetel and Sol were in a position where mutual cooperation was possible. It would actually save Cahetel a small amount of resources if mankind volunteered for the sake of the grand project in which Hyades was engaged. The project of Sophotransmogrification covered thousands and millions of years, and reached through thousands of cubic lightyears of space, and involved unguessed expanses of nebula and suns and worlds.

And for Hyades, and, presumably, for Cahetel, it was not a matter of life and death. No, death was something individual organisms did. This was a matter of triumph or genocide. Whole races, whole star systems, whole civilizations, the unimaginable richness of mental processes throbbing at the core of machines larger than gas giants, all would be degraded and destroyed if the project failed.

(Was there a word for death on a scale larger than genocide? Larger than planetary extinctions? On an astronomical scale?)

So Cahetel was not going to go away and leave mankind alone. The two score or so worlds within a volume of thirty-three lightyears the Equations assigned for Sol at this point in time to colonize were not to be left to go to waste.

He had an aching hunger for more answers. But Montrose, as if by an intuition, knew he would get no more out of the emissary of Cahetel standing before him. The black strands of material elongating from the faceless skull were now seeking out connections with information nodes, control switches, junction boxes, and the like. This nameless creature was mutating from being a negotiator to being a captain. Sedna was preparing for an interstellar journey.

Montrose tapped the serpentine. “Can you connect me to the loudspeakers? I want to talk to everyone left alive and sane aboard this world.”

Two of the screens near him showed him a roster of the personnel. The psychological contour showed such a similarity of mind and memory-chain that Montrose saw no need to interview them each individually.

His voice rang from deck to deck though all corridors honeycombing the little world of rock and ice. “Gentlemen, we are defeated. It has been an honor serving with you. My command had led you to disgrace and loss. If it is any comfort to those who grieve, the Archangel-level version of me is dead, and his memory chains have been vampirized by the enemy.

“At this time I am negotiating surrender terms. Cahetel will take control of the Black Fleet, and use the fifty worldlets to deracinate the Earth, and the colonies of experimental humans on Venus, and the penal colony of the Space Chimera on Mars. Then the worldlets will spread sail and head out for those worlds we were long ago told it was our fate to torture into Earth-like shape, and to torment our children into adapting to. This includes exile to the twenty-six worlds of the Second Sweep, and it includes pilgrimage to the fifteen worlds of the twelve stars in the First Sweep, where we can bury the dead and continue the terraforming and pantropic enterprises your ancestors against their will began.

“However, the Cahetel entity would prefer volunteers to unwilling victims.

“The disasters of the First Sweep speak for themselves. I am prepared to offer the entity that if it will undertake to prevent Jupiter from extending control over these forty Stepmother Earths, volunteers willing to escape the tyranny of life under the Power of Jupiter can be found.

“Cahetel has sufficient mass to convert part of its substance to murk, creating a mind able to resist the cunning of Jupiter. It could sit in the sun like a Salamander in a campfire—we know that Hyades knows how to build structures able to withstand that environment—and be out of Jupiter’s reach. The Salamander could be given direct control of the Gravitic-Nucleonic distortion rings, and so would control both radio-laser communication and launching and deceleration energy for sailing ships hereafter.

“It is a simple deal. The First Sweep showed that we humans, biological humans, are more efficient when it comes to the dirty, low-tech business of breeding and dying on a frontier and taming a world. All we want in return is freedom. No more children taken away from mothers to go into the Venus pits of Jupiter’s servants. No more genocides of races and bloodlines deemed unfit. That is what the colonies will have. It will be hell, but it will be a hell of our making. It will be ours, and—more important—we will be ours. Each man will own himself.

“And, in return, the critter living in the sun, the Salamander, just won’t let Jupiter run things to suit himself. The Salamander will be told to take orders from humans living outside the Noösphere, because we are the only ones going to be living and dying on the new worlds.

“I don’t know what Cahetel will say. It may be more expensive to do what I am suggesting than whatever resources are saved by winning our willing cooperation. Maybe the Salamander would have to be special ordered from manufacturing back at Epsilon Tauri, in which case, we will not see this deal come through until roughly the Thirty-seventh Millennium, when the Hyades returns again for the Third Sweep.

“I do not know, gentlemen of the Myrmidon race, how much of your master and creator Del Azarchel lives in you. He would be willing to think along those time scales, and to plan out the generations by the hundreds and by the thousands. And your race is unlikely to flourish on these new worlds—the primitive conditions will make it impossible to repair, replace, or manufacture the Aurum substance of your thinking peripheries. The Swans may also prove maladaptive. But both the Second and the Third Humanities can help the first few generations of Firsts get a foothold, and, in time, there will be second expedition to each of these stars, and third, and long after that, regular trade, and enough of a foothold of civilization that the less robust and more complex forms of man could also spread out.

“You see, if your master Del Azarchel brings back even half the contraterrene I expect, Sol will be rich enough to be able to fund a fleet of star vessels, and will be able to spin up the starbeams.

“You can stay here, and go into suspension with me, and live to see the end of these great events. Or you can stay aboard, go out and create the future I am describing, and never see Earth again, and be buried under the strange lights of far suns.

“I am going to use that tinfoil bubble lifeboat the mutineers so thoughtfully provided. It will take me nearly a century to reach the inner system again. So I should be just in time to greet Blackie when he arrives.

“What will I tell him, gentlemen? What do I tell your father? Will I say another generation of slaves were carried off against their will to die on alien worlds? Or will I say his children leaped into the throat of Hell, and tamed those worlds, and made them ours?

“My command ended in death and failure. I am not qualified to make this decision. Effective immediately, I resign my commission as commander-in-chief and abdicate my position as your Nobilissimus.

“Now hear this: I have loaded the cliometric parameters of the future I just described, written out all nice and neat in Monument notation that Cahetel can read, and placed it in the public channels of Sedna, in those areas of the infosphere Cahetel has not corrupted with murk.

“I believe in democracy. I have just now set the channel to broadcast the offer to Cahetel if the majority of you so indicate. I have locked the channel, so that I can neither interfere nor stop you, no matter which way you decide.

“It is your future, your vote, your verdict, your fate. You are the masters of your world, now. You are the judges of this present age.”

The screen immediately showed a unanimous decision. The serpentine hummed as the “plea” was offered to Cahetel.

The entity said no word of agreement, but at that same moment, the broadcast towers and horns controlled by the black substance oozing from the giant corpse began sending signals to the fifty worldlets of the Black Fleet, and a powerful beam was directed toward the main mass of Cahetel itself, still half a lightyear away. Instrument readings showed the pulses carried the fluctuations consonant with notation for the cliometric code Montrose had written. The emissary was given the offer to the Cahetel cloud.

But it would not wait for a reply. As best Montrose could guess, the whole Collaboration from Cahetel to M3 and beyond operated on what might be called speed-of-light federalism. Decisions had to be made locally, and whoever was around decades or centuries later, got the rewards or punishments for that decision. So the major decision structures were reduced, as far as possible, to algorithms propagated to each servant race and servant, telling it how to weigh and make decisions.

Nor did Cahetel make any announcement of agreement. From its inhuman point of view, apparently it was more efficient merely to start carrying out its side of the bargain without bothering to confirm the covenant by any further formality. Presumably, if mankind did not live up to mankind’s side of the bargain, some terrible vengeance would fall upon some remote generation in the far future, just as the cliometric equations shared between them specified.

But human psychology required ceremony.

Montrose drew a deep breath, and sent the words ranging over the loudspeaker, “Know ye all men by these presences that by their solemn oath and sacred honor, the Potentate emissary for the Virtue Cahetel, sent from the Domination of Hyades, the Dominion of Praesepe, and the Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, and the officers and crew of the memory chain called Dissent, an emanation from the most noble and ancient Ximen del Azarchel, of the Third Humanity called Myrmidons, on behalf of all the peoples, races, nations, tongues, and machines of the Solar System, and also of Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis, collectively called The Empyrean Polity of Man, have this eighth day of August, the feast day of holy Saint Dominic Guzman, Year of Our Lord Twenty-four Thousand One Hundred One, entered into a solemn and indestructible covenant to their mutual benefit, pleasure, and advantage, the terms whereof are binding on them and their generations forever. Witnessed this day by Menelaus Illation Montrose, vagabond. Nolite Vexare Texam!”

Montrose heard cheering issuing from many voices, many klaxons, echoing in the distance. He even heard the voices of the Firstlings and other non-Myrmidons mingling with the general outcry.

It was the voice of free men.