“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 distrac
ted 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?