There were other lesser planets, Powers and Principalities, reduced to servitude by expeditions of Virtues sent out by Epsilon Tauri. Mankind’s fellow slaves.
One was HD 28678, a single star with a single gas giant, some seven hundred forty lights from Sol. The gas giant was alive like Jupiter, and had absorbed all the lesser planets and asteroids in the system to itself.
Another was 49 Eridani, which Earthly astronomers thought to be a blue subgiant star. There was a semi-permeable Dyson sphere around the star, which absorbed wavelengths useful to the civilization there, and only let pass through the vibrations not useful to them. The star hence appeared cooler and older than its true temperature, classification, and age. The star also appeared larger than its real size, since the diameter was that of the outer layer of Dyson sphere plates.
A third was T Tauri, a young and brilliant variable star some 420 lightyears beyond the Hyades cluster. The information showed twenty or thirty separate races had evolved on the surfaces of asteroids, planetoids, centaurs, and plutinos in the dozen belts and archipelagoes in that system, as the immense energy of the star apparently created an immense evolutionary fecundity. All but ten of the alien races of T Tauri had reformed themselves into machinelike forms of life, and blended with each other. There was cliometric information listed as well. The system was in the midst of an engineering project, and all the matter of the many belts and clouds was being broken down and reassembled.
Another: he saw the star Beta Tauri, called Alnath, a near neighbor only 131 lightyears from Earth, but far beyond the thirty-three lightyear diameter the Hyades defined for the Second Sweep of mankind. The gas giant there spawned a race of beings whose civilization radiated radio signals which might have been detected from Earth, had the proper instruments been orbited in the late Neolithic. But Ain discovered the emissions thousands of years ago, sent an emissary, and the wasteful radio noise was stopped, as new energy systems and new communication systems were imposed. By the time Marconi on Earth invented the first crystal radio set, Alnath was silent.
And there were twenty more. Only two polities (one Archangel, one Potentate) were thriving on solid planets, but these were small worlds, like Mercury, cinders huddled near their gigantic suns, and their civilizations had grown outward from the bottoms of boiling lakes and steaming oceans of chemicals never seen on Earth outside of a metallurgical laboratory.
The other lesser races enthralled by Hyades were born in gas giants of the “Fire Giant” type unknown to Soclass="underline" bodies larger than Jupiter nearer their home stars than Venus.
Apparently life did not often arise on planets like Earth. Its atmosphere was too thin, and its temperature too cold, to aid in the formation of the most useful and most likely of organic chemicals.
And none of the planets, not one, depicted a race of beings that evolved to dwell on the surface of their worlds. All were aquatic. They were either Mercury-creatures shaped like swarms of motes smaller than viruses swimming through seas of molten metal or else were Jupiter-monsters larger than archipelagoes swimming through methane hydrospheres thicker and darker than any oceans of Earth.
In neither case were there any images or specifications of the biological forms of the subject species. Listed here were only energy outputs, locations and number of communication centers, volume of calculation power. Hyades did not record any information about the shapes and biological limitations of bodies.
Montrose saw the cliometric information on evolution rates, if “evolution” were the proper word for artificial changes. He assumed there was no more point to tracking the bodily shapes of creatures scores or hundreds of lightyears away, information decades or centuries in the past, than there would have been to track changes in lady’s fashions. Brain information could at will be edited, redacted, copied, or transcribed directly into bodies (biological or mechanical or both or neither) that could be created, altered, and shed at will. The individual members, across interstellar distances, were as insignificant as the individual cells in a human body. These civilizations were Noöspheres now. According to the Cold Equations, the only thing that really mattered about them was the volume of matter and energy in spacetime they could transform from useless to useful forms: how much work they could do.
And these so-called primitive races were not primitive at all. Some had library systems covering part of their world, or several worlds, or had thinking engines filling the volume of moons and planets and gas giants: They were Archangels, Potentates, and Powers.
Some were in advance of Sol, with megascale engineering structures orbiting their home stars in rings and ovals and woven strands of material, hemispheres or globes surrounding their suns, some or all of the material in the clouds and planetary belts and cometary haloes redesigned, transformed, made into self-aware calculation substances. They were Virtues, Principalities, and Hosts.
If there were any conquered civilization or species below what Rania had dubbed the Angelic level, the level equal to what Del Azarchel had achieved by reducing the entire hydrosphere of Earth to a coherent thinking system, it was not shown on these charts. Kardashev Zero species were too insignificant to be included.
Whatever hope Montrose might have harbored for contacting these beings, his fellow servants, and fomenting a general rebellion was dashed when he saw how much more advanced they were than Tellus, how much more bound to the Hyades systems of law and trade.
And these were only the projects under the rule of the star Ain. What mighty works preoccupied the four hundred remaining conquering stars in the Hyades Cluster were not imparted in the Cahetel maps and diagrams.
4. The Minions of Praesepe
The view widened again. Now the screens showed farther stars and greater beings. Here were the other Dominations, the equals of Hyades, and the fellow servants of something far superior to them, a Dominion seated in M44, the Praesepe Cluster. Montrose saw where the centers of power of the Dominations bound in fealty to Praesepe were.
Closest to Hyades was a small Domination whose capital was in the Melotte 111 star cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices, some 270 lightyears distant from Sol, occupying fifty stars.
This cluster of interlocking civilizations had made the choice of Achilles, to live splendid and short lives: the cliometric calculus showed rapid expansion followed by a sudden drop off and senescence. Circa A.D. 3,500,000 the various creatures and components of Melotte 111 Domination would destroy themselves in a series of psychological socioeconomic contractions. These extinctions would leave behind a rich detritus of elements, of artifacts, of libraries. A group of interstellar civilizations, now in the planning stage, destined to combine into a Domination in that same vicinity circa A.D. 5,500,000 would discover this detritus, and be catapulted precociously into the higher levels of mental topography, and become a Dominion. This Dominion would prove so useful against the wars and deprivations anticipated to arise throughout the Orion Arm in that era, that Praesepe did nothing to interfere with the suicidal shortsightedness of Melotte 111.
Next in size and power was a supercivilization spread throughout the famous Pleiades Cluster at 440 lights, a cluster dominated by hot, blue, and extremely luminous stars which (so the cliometric information revealed) had been fed interstellar rivers of gas to increase their burning and shorten their lives. For what purpose, the notation did not say.
Montrose saw the expansion plans of Ptolemy’s Cluster at eight hundred lights away, one of the closer servants races. The servant of Praesepe farthest from Earth was seated in the Cone Nebula, over two thousand lightyears away.
Xi Persei in the California Nebula, fifteen hundred lights from Sol, was the center of an immense globe of expansion, far outstripping the modest effort of Hyades. The smallest globe of expansion was in M42, also called the Orion Nebula, at sixteen hundred lights centered at Trapezium Cluster, where the civilization was busily making new stars. The cliometric mathematics displayed on side screens associated with these stars showed that Orion Nebula was destined to outstrip and overtake his master, the Dominion at Praesepe. This would take place in roughly a billion years.