“Why the hell should we serve the Hyades?” It burst out of him before he knew what he said.
The tendrils reaching down from the eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth of the creature now waved and writhed like the arms of a squid, standing out in each direction. It looked like a hand reaching through the mouth of a mask suddenly opening its fingers.
But it was not a threatening gesture. The ropes and twigs of murk material dripping from the face of the black skull were pointing; a first group at the screens, a second group at the dome, or at the deck. Montrose knew from his internal star atlases that each in this second group of tendrils were pointing at one or another of the areas of space the screens represented: Coma Berenices, Pleiades, Ptolemy’s Cluster, the Cone Nebula, Xi Persei, and Orion Nebula.
Then he noticed each tendril in the second group was twisted or flexed in such a way to make it complementary to an oppositely twisted tendril in the first. They were paired up: one tendril pointed at the screen showing M34, and its mate was pointed downward at the position where (had the bulk of Sedna not been in the way) the constellation Perseus turned.
He opened his mouth to ask the creature why it made itself so damn hard to understand? Cahetel obviously could make itself more human at will, able to talk more clearly. Why all this dropping hints?
Montrose snapped his mouth shut without speaking. He was not as smart as Big Montrose, but he still enjoyed a many-leveled mind of posthuman efficiency, rapid as lightning and clear as crystal. He did not need to ask what the many parallel thought-structures in his mind could see for him using their method of rapid sequential intuition.
The resources absorbed by dialog with any man would be charged against Man’s racial indenture. Brevity was more efficient.
It was the same reason why Cahetel had come toward Sol taking leisurely millennia rather than a century and a half. Cahetel was saving Sol money.
“We’ve been enslaved by the cosmic misers!” Montrose thought savagely to himself. “They are charging us by the syphilitic word!”
And they might be charging by the second. That was not a comforting thought.
He looked carefully again at the screens and related cliometric information. It was a detailed map of the Orion Arm out to two light-millennia, and a map of future history out to A.D. One Million, the end of the current Epoch.
“You cannot spare any resources, can you? Why? Why are you so poxing poor?”
With a stab of clarity akin to terror, he remembered how hard and cruel his mother and his older relatives all had made themselves to be, during the Starvation Years, back when he was young. Poor folk could be generous with each other, but not with strangers, or livestock.
He remembered the savage efficiency his mother used wringing a neck of a chicken, nasty, smelly birds whom she tried so desperately to keep alive long enough to sell. If the chickens could talk, any dialog between Ma and some bedraggled, proud cock with a plan for saving more chicks would no doubt have been much like this talk with Cahetel.
“Why are you poor? What is happening?”
We detect an error in the memories of Menelaus Montrose. The other Dominations in service to Praesepe are not allies to Hyades. We are not displaying the locations and extrapolations of fellow servants pursuing a mutual long-term gain.
“They are your enemies.”
The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.
Montrose wondered if it spent fewer resources to repeat a statement than to formulate a new one. Then he realized this was not a threat from Cahetel toward Sol. Cahetel was speaking of a threat to Hyades, its master.
“Hold up. What the hell? You mean—you are in a contest to colonize planets. I get that. Whoever spreads the most races to the most worlds wins. The losers get—what happens to them? I don’t get that. Praesepe kills them?”
Silence. Apparently the miserliness of the creature with its words extended even to an unwillingness to confirm the obvious.
Montrose looked again at the cliometric information. The Domination at the Pleiades, according to the figures and diagrams, had been downgraded, and was in the process of being dismantled. Liquidated. He could not tell from the code notations whether this meant screaming and weeping millions of some sort of big-headed fish people were being fed into abattoirs, or if it meant gigantic machines in orbit being reduced in energy intake and lowering their intelligence by an order of magnitude.
Montrose reflected that, by the standards of the world when he was a child, he himself, in this current body with his brain made of logic diamond, was an artificial being, at least a cyborg; and the death of his giant central self, and the sudden jar of senile stupidity, was exactly the kind of lowering of intellectual resources he had just been imagining. So it was either death camps or it was planetwide senility, a voluntary act of self-lobotomy. He was not sure which was worse.
He looked more closely at the information.
Hyades was lagging far behind Xi Persei in the number and rate of planets colonized. But the measure was not merely the amount of new planetary oceans to be filled with organisms from mother worlds. It was a matter of stellar-scale engineering.
Hyades, albeit behind in colonization, was devoting more effort to building ringworlds and metallic clouds and Dyson spheres and hemispheres and other macroscale structures Montrose could put no name to, engineering projects that looked like balls of string loosely wound around stars.
“You want to turn all the inanimate matter in this arm of the galaxy into thinking machinery. Why?”
To think.
Montrose wondered if he imagined the hint of sarcasm in the creature’s voice.
“Why compel us, all these lesser civilizations, to aid you?”
To save time.
6. Shroeder’s Law
Montrose wished he had time to think.
What could he say to this creature that would lead to some good outcome, any kind of outcome, that was good for the human race?
Big Montrose must have seen it. The creature was pawing through the dead brain of Big Montrose like a ghoul pawing through a desecrated grave. It must know the answer it wanted Montrose to utter. It wanted him to speak a correct plea.
Frustrated, Montrose also did not want to let this opportunity slip. He was being shown, like a prisoner glimpsing the sunlit and wider world outside his cell through a crack in the door, just an adumbration of what the great galactic network of meta-civilizations controlling this arm of the galaxy was like. It was everything he had traveled to the Monument to discover, it was the reason he had stabbed himself so foolishly in the brainpan so long ago with an experimental intelligence augmentation chemical.
Hell, this was older than that. The brightly colored dreams of his childhood comics were all about this.
This was the future he had never been allowed to see.
He could not shake the fear that it was all about to slip through his fingers and be lost, like wine spilled in the desert.
“You still have not answered me. Why?”
The Principality of Ain serves the Domination of Hyades because we are compelled. The Domination of Hyades serves the Dominion of Praesepe because they are compelled. All other behavior options are forestalled as nonviable, inefficient, incorrect.
“Incorrect for what?”
Sophotransmogrification.
“Why not use your own people?”
Your people are expendable. They can be spent in sub-marginal colonization. Our people are expended in concentrations in nebulae and in stellar clouds of greater density.