The biped asked, “Do you conclude the Senior has abandoned us? That he is not aboard the White Ship which has been in transit all this time?”
Montrose said, “I dunno. But riddle me this: If Blackie was still interested in Earth, even a wee bit, why didn’t he make a second body of himself to leave behind to run this first empire?”
The biped said, “So he did. They all wanted to go.”
But the centaur mask said, “He cares nothing for empire. That task is ours.”
But the snake mask said, “We all participate in some or all of his memory chains. He has not departed from us, for he is in us, and is with us.”
But the wheel masks said, “The Senior is the Jupiter Brain. More and more of the levels of the mental ecology of that realm of the outer Noösphere are becoming as one with him. He absorbs lesser minds, and compels the loyalty of smaller spirits. Without such loyalty, Jupiter will not expend the vast resources needed to ignite the deceleration beam five hundred years from now.”
Montrose said, “So you are telling me that Blackie will return here, loaded with as much antimatter as we need, the same millennium as the Second Sweep is coming?”
“No,” answered the biped. “One thousand sixty-four years later, so it will be in the next millennium. However, our energy budget after that point will exceed the total theoretically possible energy budget of the approaching Second Armada, called Cahetel. We are concerned with this interval.”
The centaur said, “In his absence, we turn to you to rectify matters.”
Montrose could feel the gap in his thinking as obvious, to someone of his brainpower, as a missing tooth felt with a tongue. The sensation was annoyingly similar to trying to pick up a watermelon seed with thumb and forefinger. But he was not smart enough to coax the shy thought into view. (Evidently the shy thought was equally smart as he.)
“I don’t get what you are asking me, or why you are here,” he said crossly. “You are planning to surrender to the Second Armada and turn over the Earth to them for another rape session. Why disturb me?”
The serpent mask said, “We overestimated your intelligence. We will explain in smaller and clearer steps. The Senior contrived the progenitors of our race to be complementary to what was known of Hyades psychology and practice. All possible reproductive strategies can be roughly categorized into two groups: the reptilian strategy of engendering many offspring and expending small resources on their care and support, or the kindred strategy of engendering few offspring while expending large resources on their care and support. Due to the vastness of space and the cost of moving resources between star systems, the Hyades has adopted the reptilian strategy. The R-strategy means that Hyades will expend no concern nor care for the civilizations it uses to reproduce the cliometric vectors of its social organization.”
“Yeah. Hyades treats us and everyone like the clap. I got the concept. Where are you going with this?”
“You acknowledge, then, that to the Hyades Domination, we stand in the relation as an offspring, and the resources expended on us are calculated by the reptilian strategy of utmost frugality?” said the serpent.
“Sure. Hyades casts out colonies without caring whether they live or die, like sea turtles leaving their eggs alone on a beach. Of course, I always wondered why Hyades put us into a situation where we had to build a Jupiter Brain in order to decode and transmit the secrets of pantropy and terraforming to our colonies. Because if we did not care, we wouldn’t have bothered … but what does this have to do with my question?”
“Do you acknowledge that the entity astronomers called Cahetel, which will arrive in the Twenty-fifth Millennium, stands in the same relation to the Hyades as do we?”
“Wait—what?”
“The Cahetel entity, like Asmodel before her, is not an expedition as you understand the term. The Hermetic was sent to the Diamond Star as if she were still dependent upon and loyal to the authorities who dispatched and funded her. This was an error. When Hermetic returned, history had erased those authorities, and the new generation of polities on Earth, who were strangers to the Hermetic and her crew, attempted to confiscate the ship and cargo.”
“A piratical crime we are still feeling the echoes of,” muttered Montrose. “Had it not been for that, Blackie would not have declared himself King of the World and Emperor of the North Pole or whatever.”
“It was not a crime at all,” said the serpent coolly, “but a perfectly rational action which should have been anticipated. The expedition erred because the authority who sent it assumed a K-strategy, a kinship strategy, could be maintained across a fifty lightyear gap between Sol and the Diamond Star, across the one hundred twenty-five year interval between the expedition launch and return. We calculate that Hyades makes no such error.”
“You mean the Hyades does not give a tinker’s damn about what happens to the Cahetel expedition?”
“Affirmative. Because it is not an expedition properly so called, and neither was Asmodel. They were colonies. They happened to be colonies in motion. According to the Cold Equations the Hyades must use to organize their affairs in the long term, the expense in energy and the profits from cultivating the human race and seeding us to colony worlds, surely is borne by the entities, whatever their form, that live in the Cahetel Cloud or the Asmodel gas giant.”
“Then they stand or fall all on their lonesome. That means—”
It meant that armed resistance to the Hyades was not futile after all. They were not fighting an entire interstellar empire, just one boatload of adventurers, a cross between a squad of big-game hunters and slave-raiding party.
It meant that the realization which so long ago had driven him into this self-inflicted exile was simply and hellishly wrong. Montrose was, despite himself, momentarily appalled at how long it had been. Eleven thousand, one hundred and thirty-five years. It was roughly the same amount of time that separated the Hamburg culture of Late Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters from the year of his birth. And what had he accomplished during that time? He had napped.
The serpent mask said, “Our psychology, which you dismiss as loveless and cruel, is based on this same mathematical model of reproductive strategy. This enables us to understand Cahetel. If the expense of conquest is too great, she must retreat to serve her own economic self-interest, and seek another target. Cahetel has no loyalty to Hyades, who will not avenge her downfall. If Man can drive off the Cahetel Cloud, she will not be allowed to return home to the Hyades stars.”
“The Swans thought they could make the attack too expensive. All that will happen is that the Hyades will tack the extra cost to our bill, and keep the human race as an indentured servant for longer.”
“Correction: the Cold Equations show that the entities like Cahetel and Asmodel take all the entrepreneurial risk themselves. We suspect Asmodel has been destroyed, because too many human colonies died, and the return on investment was insufficient. And, unlike the First Sweep, we need only maintain opposition for one thousand sixty years. At four lightyears distance, the White Ship will be within effective firing range.”
“Hold up. What opposition? Was Asmodel destroyed? Destroyed? Are you saying—” Montrose realized that the Witch-woman, Zoraida, who had told him so unthinkably long ago that mankind had won the war, had been no wild-eyed idealist. She had been right.
Man had won.
That meant he could win again.
10. Dissent
The biped spoke up, his voice cold and crisp. “Have we not been clear? With the departure of the Senior Del Azarchel, our prime memory chains have suffered divarication. There is an opposition faction among us who advocate a more efficient strategy of Hyades-Tellurian interaction. The five of us here occupying these four bodies represent the memory chains of this faction: you may called us Dissent.”