But Asmodel had no reason to linger and rule the Earth. The earthlings were not sophisticated enough to domesticate. It merely scooped up raw material, including thinking materials such as people, from the planet’s surface and parts of the logic diamond from the planet core, as well as enough of the ecosphere to sustain them only for the voyage, and shipped them off by lightsail to distant and worthless worlds.
They saw the conditions of the stars, one after another after another, like a roll call of names, famed in song and prose, of the nearby yellow stars, near twins of Sol, his sisters: Promixa, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570 in Libra, HR 7703 in Sagittarius, Tau Ceti. The music unfolded mathematical notations that formed images in their brains.
All were very nearly Earth-like, near enough to make their morbific flaws all the most hideous.
It was a roster of unfit planets, a freak show: a torch world, too close to his sun for human life; or a tide-locked world with no rotation, half fiery Hell and half Niflheim; or a cold world orbiting a dull star; or a world tormented by open plains of lava; or a globe choked with an atmosphere of deadly gas; or one flooded with seas of venom; or a subterrestrial too light to hold an atmospheric thick enough to block deadly radiation; or a superterrestrial of bone-breaking gravity; or a globe tumbling pole over pole through an orbit eccentric enough to boil the seas in summer and freeze the atmosphere in winter; or one cloaked in magnetic fields too intense for human nervous systems to remain sane; or a world entangled with an asteroid belt, doomed to endless extinction-level collisions.
Worthless. Unfit for human habitation.
A new movement started, a cliometric analysis of the futures of such worlds, like a fan of possibilities, a glimpse of hope, a gleam.…
Again, the music cut off abruptly.
Montrose said slowly, as if each word were pain, “The final expression Phi substructure in the Concubine Vector shows a negative sum for any long-term relation. It says only marginal worlds, ones not worth their colonists, are where our people are being sent. They are being sent to die.”
Selene said, “With the immensely powerful magnifications the twin orbital mirrors permit, we have studied the target stars of the First Sweep and verified the Cenotaph reports: these worlds cannot support human life as it is currently constituted, neither surface-based nor Melusine, nor Man nor Swan nor Ghost. Hence, all the deracinated are fated to die.”
“I do not understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his tone of voice made it clear this was something he wished were true, not something that was.
Montrose said, “The First Sweep stars are those to which our populations have been hauled by force. The slave colonies. Proxima Centauri and Delta Pavonis.…”
“I know that, you fool!” said Del Azarchel. “I do not understand the purpose!”
“Be at peace,” said Selene, with strange, unnatural calm. “We have already established the ceremony of mourning for the myriad populations doomed to perish, albeit, clearly, the genocides will not take place for decades or centuries.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps some sort of provision aboard the ship will act as an intermediary.…”
Selene said, “Deceive yourself with no false hope. The Hyades slave ships will lower the earth life to the surface, desert or deep ocean or mountain or volcano, and expel them without further ado. Whether they live or die is no concern. The Cenotaph is utterly unambiguous on that point.”
Montrose said softly, “Some means must exist—if the shipboard Hyades controls permitted the people to convert whatever life-support equipment aboard the slave ships”—an uneven note troubled Montrose’s voice—“habitats could be burrowed out of the crust using the skyhook as a pile driver—a few habitats—for a few years—could—could be by some long shot, could find a way to survive.…”
Montrose in his posthuman imagination was able to picture and feel what the death of millions of people would be like, each and every death, lingering or sudden. The vision of it was like a cold hand, choking him. He wished for the days when he was stupider, and could ignore things, or see them only dimly.
His posthuman intellect could also deduce that such jury-rigged habitats, even assuming an unrealistically high mass of the slave ship converted to useful life support, could not expand, hence could not long sustain a population.
“The long shot is long indeed, Dr. Montrose,” said Selene, “for the Hyades will provide no way. We have no means for seeding crops beforehand, nor altering the gas balances in unbreathable atmospheres. The cruelty is unimaginable: millions dropped at random even in this fashion on Earth would simply be decimated.”
Del Azarchel said, “No advanced species can be so wasteful!”
Selene said softly, “The waste, Senior Del Azarchel, is small indeed to beings affluent beyond measure. There are two hundred sixty thousand stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of Sol, none of which are utterly barren. With so many worlds, even if less than one percent were useful to them, scores of thousands remain from which many hundreds can be selected for slave colonies. Alas that natural man is adapted to the environment of the Earth’s surface too perfectly to prosper elsewhere, or even to survive.”
Montrose said, “But why? Launching Asmodel required more energy than our race has ever produced in all our years put together. Why go to such expense just to exterminate so many innocent people? Why not just gas them or blast them or space them or drop them into a sun?”
Selene said, “As you deduced, the behavior is ceremonial. By interfering with the Diamond Star, just as the Monument warned you not to, you triggered a reaction; a reaction which the Cold Equations of their inhuman law requires them to carry out, lest their inhuman neighbors among the constellations perceive the omission. If we were advanced sufficiently to be a race for whom the Monument was written, being expelled naked onto the surface of a hostile world would be no discomfort. Such is our punishment for presuming ourselves to have been so high. Such are the wages of overweening pride.”
Montrose felt sick. The endless years he had struggled against the Hermeticists, and against time itself, to produce a race able to resist the aliens—it was all futile.
He looked in Del Azarchel’s eye. The handsome and smiling face was not smiling now. If anything, his eye was even more empty and hollow than Montrose’s. He had spent not only endless years, but endless lives sacrificed as if on the altar of some primitive bloodthirsty idol of stone with goggle eyes and gaping jaws.
But here the idol was of the superiority of the unknown civilization of Hyades. To be enslaved, if it meant to serve as an apprentice and learn the master’s secrets, that, perhaps, a hardhearted man could abide to see done at such a dreadful cost. But to be enslaved for nothing? To be taken not as sheepdogs but as sheep? Merely to be exterminated as vermin?
Del Azarchel said, “The Cenotaph started to say something about the future of these worlds. What is the rest of this message? What is written on the moon?”
“I cannot read the Moon Cenotaph,” said the moon in her silver voice.
Both men looked nonplussed. “Do you jest?” Del Azarchel said, “But this message comes from the Cenotaph.”
“You read it,” she said.
Montrose shouted, “Why do you talk in riddles?”
Selene said, “Riddles contain multilayered information density. You know enough now to make your decision.”
“What are we supposed to decide, pox it?”
“What do you know?” she asked.
Montrose gritted his teeth. “Mother Selene, I know this is all putrefaction and pestiferication. A pack of lies! It cannot be so that you read the Monument segment concerning the Concubine Vector only recently. Rania translated that section of the Monument just in her head on our wedding night, in less than an hour or two. She knew all about the Concubine Vector. That is why she knew the Earth was going to be treated badly by the Hyades Cluster, who say they own us. That is why she took off for M3. So why are you yerking my piss hose?”