And these maps did not reach beyond two thousand lightyears. Everything here was within one small segment of the Orion Arm. A few points in the Sagittarius or Perseus Arms were depicted, such as Ximen del Azarchel’s destination and flight path—yes, the motion of a vessel that large and that fast was observable to any large-scale orbital telescope. But few or no shipping lanes crossed between arms of the galaxy, and no downward chains of command. Where a shipping lane did cross the void between arms, one or more artificial columns or streamers of dust and nebular material had been constructed like a bridge. It was the opposite of what he would have expected. Emptier space was less economical for the starfaring civilizations to cross. That implied some sort of hydrogen ramscoop ship technology at work.
He corrected himself. He could not conclude that all starfaring civilizations were so limited. M3, for example, an Authority occupying a cloud of five hundred thousand stars, was orders of magnitude more powerful than these little polities of fifty or five hundred stars. Their chains of command reached across galactic distances all the way to Sol. The Authority technology could be as far beyond the Hyades as the Hyades was beyond Jupiter.
The largest scale star charts displayed the relative position of the arms of the Milky Way and the subgalaxies orbiting the core, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy would almost complete one orbit of the Milky Way in that period of time before the gravitic and tidal forces disrupted its structure, and brought its stars slowly into indistinguishable union with the other Milky Way stars.
Montrose, looking at the time values for those predictions, had the disorienting sensation of being a mayfly looking at a mountain. Surely, the mountain would wear down in time, but when measured in terms of the number of mayfly lives added end-to-end, it became horrendous.
Then he wondered if any currents, whenever they crossed his path, felt Montrose was such a mountain.
“Ridiculous!” he said to himself. “I am just like any other man.” And he put the thought into a side pocket of his perfect memory to have a subpersonality examine later in more depth. For the moment, he wanted to concentrate on the alien.
Why was it showing him this material?
“Do you have a name?” he asked aloud.
The black-coated, dripping skull seemed to be looking at him. The voice of the serpentine came from several of the nearby screens at once: Answered previously. We are the Cahetel of Hyades.
“That is the name we call you. Have you no name for yourself?”
Have you no name for yourself.
For a moment, he wondered why the creature was repeating him. The voice was without inflection, since the creature had not mastered the nuances of using spacing, tone, and pitch for information, so he did not realize it had asked him a question.
He said, “Menelaus Montrose.”
That is the name your mother called you. Have you no name for yourself?
It learned quickly. That sentence ended on a high note, indicating a question.
“I did not pick my own name when I was christened.”
Nor did we.
And in this sentence there was a clear hint of dry humor in the tone of voice. It learned quickly indeed.
He did not know which was worse, that this creature had actually made an indirect point in a fashion he understood, or that the creature had access to his dead self’s memories, and could read some or all of them.
Perhaps anticipating his thoughts, the entity spoke again.
Names issue from the verbal centers of ideation, occupying a mono-topological plane of the mental procedural ecology. Your Potentate had begun to experiment with multiple mental topographies, but intellects beneath the Virtue level are restricted to a single dimension of thought-to-symbol rationality. The Virtue Cahetel is polydimensional, ergo mental topological transformations no longer concern us. We employ preverbal structures for symbolization between signifiers and signified, and one-to-one unambiguities between signified logic relations.
That was more like it. That sounded like an alien. Poxing incomprehensible.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Since the serpentine was using the same voice pattern as the alien, Montrose for a moment thought the alien was answering: “He is requesting a clarifying simplification.” But no, the serpentine was explaining Montrose’s comment to the entity.
The Cahetel entity spoke. Again, its voice betrayed more nuance. It almost sounded alive. Not quite.
Simplification: Our system uses different and unique names for different and unique object-events in the extensions of spacetime matter-energy, and symbolizes similarities of category by nominal similarities. Since we are not the same Cahetel now as when the moment ago we began to speak, we have no consistent name to offer.
“You seem the same to me.”
That is a limitation of your perception. If you insist on aberrant symbolism, call me Menelaus Montrose. His memory information now serves Hyades.
He is, as we are, of Cahetel. He is, as we, of Ain. He is, as we, of Hyades.
Menelaus Montrose will not endure. The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.
5. The Fellow Servants
That comment made a tremor run through him. Montrose was surprised at himself. Was talking to this abomination actually so much worse than staring down the bore of an enemy pistol? Apparently it was. When he wiped his palms on his trousers, he realized they were slick with sweat.
“Let’s stick with calling you Cahetel. Why are you showing me these star charts, these maps of time?”
That you may enter a correct plea. You now speak for the human race, including biological and formal systems, Angels, Archangels, and Potentates, up through your Power housed in your innermost planet.
“Innermost? Jupiter is the fifth planet, not the first.”
The smaller, rocky bodies of the inner system are no longer significant. Do you have sufficient to plead with us? What you say determines the outcome for your race and its generations.
“Sufficient what? Sufficient information, you mean?”
Montrose now realized why he was so frightened. One wrong phrase, one wrong word, and he lost everything.
He would lose his life and his world and their future.
He would lose Rania.
Montrose dearly wished his bigger, smarter self, the titanic body holding the calculation power of the Selene mind occupying the core of the moon, were here to advise him. His dim and flattened memories of what his larger self had meant to do, what he had understood about the universe, were like a dream that evaporates on waking. He wondered if men in the old days who suffered grievous head injuries, and forgot how to read and write, or senile grandfathers reduced to the thinking level of small children knew what this was like.
“No one appointed me to speak for the human race.”
You form a strange attractor within the cliometric system, therefore we elect you.
He had no response for that.
The creature spoke again, this time in a demanding tone of voice: Do you know sufficient facts of the general situation in which your race finds itself to determine how best to serve the Hyades?