“Got it.”
“As to your first, the fundamental moral conflict at this level is not concerned with altricial as opposed to nidifugous tactics for colonization efforts affecting interstellar magnitudes occupying the time span of cliometric history. The moral conflict on the galactic level is strategic and long term, dealing not with cliometric history but with cliometric evolution.”
“Don’t got it. Explain the difference.”
“New civilizations arise to replace dying ones even as cells in an organism replace dying components. Historical cliometry is concerned with the life span of a civilization. Evolutionary cliometry stretches far beyond the timespans of any one race, for it is concerned with the galactic organization as a whole.
“There are only two strategies of organizing evolutionary cliometry,” the ophiuroid continued. “Call them the centripetal and the centrifugal. The centripetal is centralized and hierarchical, and compels unity of action. It is legalistic rather than informal. It requires a central planning elite. It is based on rules and retaliations and requires a sameness of action. The centrifugal is self-organizing and voluntary. It requires a psychological unity to replace the legalistic unity—that is, a goal of sameness of morals and motives rather than a goal of sameness of action.”
Montrose remembered seeing that play out in his own life. When Blackie and he had been the only two practitioners of the laws of cliometry, that was centripetal. The two of them were the elite. All other human beings were just chessmen on the board of history. Then when the Swans puzzled out the rules for themselves, the puppets became the puppeteers, and everyone became an Hermeticist, and history, for a while, became more democratic and decentralized.
The ophiuroid continued, “The architecture of the different galaxies reflects their evolutionary strategies. Spiral galaxies are naturally centripetal. The spiral motion of the arms prevents any constellation of outer stars from achieving a union, since they swap positions as they rotate, and the core races occupy the resulting trade routes. No one insular race is permitted to organize itself to be able to repel the central commands from the core. Elliptical galaxies are far larger, since they are unhindered by the need to centralize planning apparatus. Elliptical galaxies are naturally centrifugal.”
“What happens if a galaxy changes its mind?”
“Gravitic manipulation to impart spin or halt it is the prime use of power at the galactic group and galactic cluster level. Such manipulation requires vast resources stationed across large volumes of time and space. The Great Attractor in Virgo is the largest known manipulation.”
“What is it for?”
“Unknown. You must inquire of the intelligence ruling the Virgo Cluster.”
This meant the cluster of galaxies, not a star cluster. Montrose sighed. One more brain-breakingly gigantic phenomenon in space that turned out to be deliberately engineered by some unknown superbeings for unknown reasons.
In a way, he was almost happy all those astronomers and enthusiasts looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life in the days before the Hermetic Expedition ever set sail, had never realized what they were looking at as they scanned the night sky with telescope and radio dish, and had never seen how plentiful and dreadful the evidence was. Merciful ignorance of exactly how little a thing man was, how puny his world and all it contained, prevented them from seeing what they stared at, and probably saved them from curling up into little whimpering balls of horror.
At the moment, he was interested in smaller and more local matters.
“Milky Way never developed a ruling elite,” he asked. “How come?”
“Unknown. Our current theory is that the extreme centrifugal stubbornness of the Milky Way is a holdover from her irregular origins before the formation of the thin disk. The Colloquium and Magisterium in the outer arms arose and achieved unity long before the Instrumentality arose as Archon in the core stars. In this regard, the Milky Way is a freak, an anomaly. She is the sole spiral galaxy who has the psychology of an elliptical.”
“And Andromeda?”
“One small collection of races, similar in life principle and cliometric tactics, comprising less than nine hundred thousand species, formed a single, tiny, but coherent civilization. This one rose to predominance in her core stars before any rival civilizations could arise elsewhere, and, unopposed, established her throne across the spiral arms and satellite galaxies of Andromeda. The inefficiency of a self-organizing system between equals who are unalike yet complementary, such as the collaboration which Milky Way three times in the grand course of evolutionary history has attempted, offends the Throne called Mindfulness.”
“We are two million lightyears away from each other! Two million with a capital M!”
“In four billion years, that will no longer be the case. Andromeda imposed a distortion point on the curvature of timespace to create the gravitational tide that draws the two galaxies together. The war was long in the contrivance, and remarkably subtle. She was aware of us, mindful of us, before we of her—hence our name for her.”
Menelaus Montrose paused in thought. Now, finally, he understood why the aliens could not simply live and let live, and let the hell alone races who didn’t want to colonize the stars and fill the empty wastelands of the galaxy. They had no choice. M3 and all the Archons and Dominions making up the Collaboration needed everything to be alive, because, otherwise, this superbeing, this collection of mental systems called the Throne of Andromeda, the Mindfulness, would fill the endless mass of the Milky Way with cognitive matter that thought along her lines, her philosophy, her worldview and way of life. Everything original to the Milky Way would be forgotten. Including, apparently, the very idea of cooperation between equals.
“What does Andromeda want?”
“As stated: to fill all the matter and energy in the Milky Way with thought-forms pleasing to Andromeda.”
“To what end?”
“The intelligence of M3, when all our minds link together, and all our mental engines operate at full output, is in the quintillion range. The Austerity of Cygnus Arm enjoys intellectual power one order of magnitude higher than mine. The Milky Way briefly achieved the sextillion range during her brief season of selfawareness, and, so we assume from the difference in mass energy, that Andromeda is in the ten-sextillion range. We cannot speculate on the long-term motives of a mind one thousand times ours in scope, subtlety, flexibility, penetration, retention, wit, and power.”
“But I understand you.”
“Your horse, Res Ipsa, also understood your tone of voice when you spoke, hence your mood, but the not the words nor the abstractions associated with them. And yet, what Res Ipsa understood, he understood correctly. He did not think you were cross when you were pleased nor vice versa. This is a credit not to his penetration but to your ability to make yourself understood to lower animals. Likewise here. What you understand of us is correctly understood, but only because we reveal ourselves to you. Andromeda has not revealed herself to us.”
Something in the sheer oddness, the sheer arrogance, of that answer reminded Montrose that thirty years or more were passing between every question and answer.
It was time to ask the more painful questions.
3. The Error of Transcription
A.D. 166,420 TO 166,480
“Tell me why you sent a false version of Rania back to Sol.”
“An error in judgment on our part. During the split second when her ship entered the surface of our energy sphere, and her biological life ended and her life within our disembodied mentality arrangement began, there was a continuity failure.”
“What does that mean?”
“A memory was encountered within her brain information with no detectable origin. It came from no detectable point in time and had no detectable cause. We assumed it was a technical error of the transcription process and removed it. All other memory chains were kept intact. It was this version we returned.”
“What was the content of the memor
y?”
“You know.”
“What do you mean, I know?”
“The same memory was found in you during your moment of transition from biological to nonbiological existence. We can stimulate the cells associated with the memory and bring it to the fore. Observe.”
“Wait—!”
4. Nonbeing Reprised
In that instant of his death and rebirth, it seemed to him as if ancient titans, vast living beings aflame with life beyond life, beyond all power of words to describe, spoke to him of the death and resurrection of the cosmos, which shined like a small and precious toy in the crystal-walled well of the transfinite singularity. Several messengers had been implanted throughout the available timespace line …
5. The Error of Transcendence
A.D. 166,480 TO 166,700
He woke up, prone on the crystal deck, his nose bleeding where he had struck it when he fell.
“You could have waited for me to sit down, you bastards.”
“The inefficiency of your upright posture, balanced precariously on your hind limbs in a high-gravity environment, is one we naturally assumed you would long ago have mitigated with some forethought of your own.”
“Yeah. What we do is warn the poor sap to sit down before we knock him unconscious.”
“We will make amends.”
There was a moment of pain in his nose, and then the bleeding stopped and the pain vanished as if it had never been. The blood turned to vapor and vanished.
The ophiuroid said, “Her memory was more complete and exact. Perhaps this is due to her nervous system more exactly mimicking the various ratios and relationships found in the unredacted segments of the Monument than yours.
“However, when we, at that time, having no other example of the human race to examine, carefully checked her memories, we saw that such apparently anachronistic and inexplicable memory-events have happened to human beings under conditions of stress or ecstasy, or during moments when continuity of life is interrupted, as when a dying man is resuscitated. We did not investigate the possibility that the memory was a faster-than-light communication from a superior form of being from outside our local galactic group, which is what she believed.
“Unfortunately, the version we had reconstructed without that particular odd memory lacked the ability to read the Monument intuitively, and there were other subtler derangements in her nervous system, too fine for us to correct. To our dismay, we realized we had damaged the emissary from Man.
“Although damaged, Rania successfully demonstrated that yours was a star-faring race. By our laws, your race was entirely vindicated in your desire for equality to Hyades and other low-ranking and short-lived servant species. We were required to manumit you and abolish all debt incurred, which we did. We were required to make this known to our servants in the Orion Arm, which we did.
“However, we owed more.
“To make amends for the ill we had done your emissary, we bestowed upon her the finest ship of the line, equipped with all the tools and utilities our imagination could contrive, and arranged to send her homeward with a revised cliometry plan for Man which would ensure the continuity of your civilizations once the erratic elements had been bred out. It was a princely gift. You showed unexpected generosity in returning it.”
Presumably this meant that M3 had taken back the Solitude as a prize.
“You intended no deception?”
“None. We were attempting to mitigate the side effects of an accident for which we hold ourselves responsible.”
“But you enslaved and brain-raped and tortured her for a thousand years before granting her an audience?”
“Ximen del Azarchel we treated in this fashion, and his internship was of like duration to your own. Rania served in our mental hierarchy for a period of thirty-three years, for by that time she had organized all the underlings in her region into a union, been elevated by their acclamation to the rank of Virtue, and had negotiated the settlement of several long-standing factional divisions obtaining in the Dominions and Dominations which serve us here, and was presented to our attention as a candidate for higher elevation yet.”
Montrose found himself grinning. “That sounds about right. It was when you put her back in a physical body, though, that is when you edited her memory, right? So the real Rania was not dead.”
“At that time, we did not have the technology for storing brain information in massless particles, as we have now. Unlike you, yes, an information copy of the unredacted Rania remained preserved as a pattern of energy pulses in our archives. While ending life is not contrary to our laws, the loss of information is.”
“But when Blackie came, you gave him the real her? Without keeping a copy?”
“Yes. His arrival informed us the unwitting damage we had unintentionally done to the cliometry of the human race by returning a false copy of your princess. To make amends, as courtesy required, we presented the unredacted original to him. He insisted no copy remain with us in any form, a wish that we have honored.”
The other question which was burning in his brain burst forth. “You are sure those two mated?”
“We are not sure. Our understanding is that your mating customs hold the mating act itself, while it is surrounded by certain public ceremonial preliminaries, to be private. We have no record of the copulation act itself, but the preliminary ceremonial of courtship and marriage is on record.”
“Marriage? He asked her to marry him and she said yes? There is supposed to be an exchange of vows.”
“He asked her to marry, yes. She gave a conditional answer. The condition was then fulfilled; therefore, the marriage was complete. We did not witness the vows.”
Montrose wrestled with his own rebellious soul a moment, watching his skin grow brighter and dimmer, and waves of wrath and despair poured through him. “I’ll believe it when I hear it from her own lips. Take me to her.”
“As we said, she is gone.”
“Gone where? Somewhere in the M3 cluster, I assume. I would have detected any large bodies departing at near-lightspeed as I approached, had they returned to the Milky Way.”
“We have already said no trace of her exists here in M3. You would have detected such a star-faring, had there been one; there was none. The couple did not return to the Milky Way.”
“Then where did they go?”
“They are currently a set of self-sustaining neutrino waves in transit to the great galaxy in Andromeda, which you also call M31 or NGC 224. Thence we broadcast her and him, over two million lightyears distant, and at a most severe expenditure of resources.”
“What in the crapulent, scrofulous, and strumous neck blisters on Old Nick in Hell are you talking about? How did you … why did you … what were you thinking? You bastards! I am going to kill you!”
“It seems you have lost your reluctance to have your race replace ours as Archon of Orion.”
“You sent my wife to Andromeda, damn you!”
“We have stations standing by and have dedicated the stars we will ignite to nova to power the broadcasts, to send your mind information to as many civilizations in Orion Arm able to receive you as we can. Your racial characteristics and performance here indicate that your sexual drive and arrogance will motivate you to suborn and interconnect the various scattered mental systems into one unity. At that point, you will command sufficient resources to broadcast yourself to Andromeda and follow them. This will also set the Orion Arm on the path foreseen by the Panspermians, and eliminate the pernicious influence of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. This will require roughly eight hundred thousand years.”
“You broadcast the two of them! You can send me!”
“Those facilities no longer exist, having been consumed in the broadcast.”
“It was a one-time deal? You can never do it again?”
“Yes. We called up the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to power and aim our contrivances, and at that time, they were unaware that we had discovered their treason. Obvious
ly, they will not be so cooperative again. In addition, several unique resources were exhausted.”
“What did she give you to expend so much?”
“We stimulated her brain cells to bring her memory anomaly to the fore, as with you. Unlike you, hers was long and detailed, and contained many thousands of units of information. We believed she was what she presented herself to be: the messenger and emissary from a higher power, of far greater intellect than our own, emanating from some point beyond the local galactic group. Whether or not, as she believed, her memory was her own, issued from a prior version of her to herself through the noumenal energy metaphenomenon that Del Azarchel was investigating, the evidence remains ambiguous.”
“Wait—she … what the hell?”
“Please express your question in a more coherent fashion.”
“She thought she was picking up her own brain waves from a previous incarnation?”
“No. She thought was recollecting memories from the greater mental structure of which she is and was a small part. This would seem to involve faster-than-light information transmission, which all evidence confirms is impossible.”
“My people at TX Canum Venaticorum thought it was possible.”
“They are young and foolish, having limited data and experience on which to draw.”
“The naked singularity at the galactic core seemed to be a faster-than-light phenomenon.”
“If a cosmic string filament had passed through this area of timespace at the moment of Rania’s memory anomaly, we would reconsider the conclusion.”
“So then why did you send her to Andromeda, if you did not believe her story?”
“Del Azarchel bargained with us and offered us a price of inestimable value if we would transmit them both there.”
“What price?”
“From an information broadcast heterodyned onto a band of dark energy issuing from a cosmic string passing through in the Centaurus Supercluster, Del Azarchel had discovered an alternate version of the Primal Reality Equations. Since these equations form a complete model and explanation of all things from the tiniest particle to the structure of the macrocosmic universe, and moreover solve all philosophical conundrums from the mind-body relation to the paradox of fate and free will, the fact that an alternate could exist was of immense interest to us.”