“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.