His mind reeled back from that thought. No. Murder was still murder, and you did not judge a man’s guilt or innocence by might-have-beens.
Then he saw something else in the images Cahetel was showing. Other areas of the sky overlapped where Blackie had spent so much time stargazing. The antimatter star in the Omega Nebula was noted there.
Bingo. That was what Blackie had been looking for. He perhaps had also been doing a mathematical analysis of star distributions and evolutionary patterns, but if so, it was not for idle curiosity but to find evidence of the engineering effort needed to make a stellar mass of antimatter. He had been seeking an energy supply to feed an interstellar civilization he meant to found and rule.
As for living in a universe where one can divide by zero, and math was just an illusion produced by the senses? No mathematician could think such nonsense. Blackie said that to throw him off the scent, so Montrose would not realize what Blackie was looking for.
In Cahetel’s images and diagrams, there was a third thing he saw, or, rather, did not see. “Your diagrams here do not show any active fighting.”
Indeed not. The Forerunners were long ago. War is mutually inefficient. We are not uncivilized creatures.
“Then it’s a Cold War?” he said.
If you refer to war by proxy, by espionage and indirect means, then that is not the correct term for our effort. We are not uncivilized creatures.
“What the hell is it, then?”
An organized effort of mutual destruction where both parties seek to minimize the negative external inefficiencies by strict adherence to a mutually agreed set of strictures.
It is a duel.
“Damn me. I guess you are civilized after all.”
8. The Forerunners of Orion
“One last question, Cahetel, and I will be ready to plea my pleading. Why is there a duel? Praesepe Cluster evidently ordered you to fill the Orion Arm with life-forms, or machine life-forms, or something. Sophont matter. Anything that thinks. And Hyades is in a duel to the death with the other slave races of Praesepe to carry out the orders. Whoever comes in last, or works least effectively, gets liquidated. I get that. But why? Why the rush? What the hell is going on?”
Hell is going on.
“Huhn? I mean, please amplify.”
Is “Hell” not the correct term for the place of endless pain for past misdeeds inflicted when all hope of correction, vendetta, or retribution is past?
“You—or Hyades—is being punished?”
Not as such. This general area of the Orion Arm is being punished.
“Why?”
The Orion Arm once enjoyed a properly growing ratio of sophont material to support material. There was a Forerunner race—call them the Panspermians—who favored the use of small, rocky planets like your Earth for the spread of life. To this end, the Panspermians distributed favorable raw materials and chemical combinations throughout the Orion Arm. The cultivation was successful, and the Panspermians flourished, becoming the Authority and then the Archon of this Arm of the Galaxy, coequal with other great powers of which Hyades knows little.
Then the Panspermian civilization vanished circa 444,000,000 B.C. We who dwell here must undo the bad effects of those events.
That was the Silurian Period on Earth. It was about when the latest and greatest form of life on the surface of the planet was moss. In the ocean the biggest invention thrilling the sea life was coral. And some ambitious fish had developed the jawbone.
“Vanished how?”
The specifics are not known. Civilizations of this magnitude vanish only when conquered, and they are conquered only when internal conflict and self-destructive comportments weaken them.
“So they were conquered? By who?”
Unknown. Hyades reports only that the conqueror favored the cultivation of gas giants, jovians and superjovians, as being more likely candidates, richer in matter, to use as a base resource for creating living planets, over the small and rocky worlds preferred by the Panspermians.
“So the Big Planet guys beat up the Little Planet guys,” muttered Montrose. It explained the preponderance of life-forms evolved on Jovian worlds he had just seen in these records. But it did not explain the source of the conflict. For some reason, he was reminded of the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in the old satire by Swift, fought between those who cracked their breakfast eggs on the big end versus the small end.
“Do your masters know what the war was about?”
We suspect they know.
“But they didn’t tell you?”
As before, the emissary entity did not answer the obvious.
Montrose continued: “So—because this Forerunner race wiped itself out, or let itself be wiped out by Big-Endians, the Orion Arm was laid waste. Let me guess. All Big Boys, the civilized stars and nebulae in the Orion Arm, are in Hell, because you-all are being punished for that crime. Is that it?”
Yes. We-all occupy the volume of space that allowed itself to fall fallow. The consequences of that misdeed must be rectified. The Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, acting through the Dominion in the Praesepe Cluster, assumes the perquisites and the liabilities to continue the legacy of the lost Archon of Orion. By law, all lesser civilizations within this volume fall under the same authority. The primary obligation is to complete the unfinished project of Sophotransmogrification.
“By what right do you impose this obligation on us?”
The elemental composition of your world betrays traces of Panspermian influence in the creation of primordial life here. You owe your life. If a failure to reciprocate were to become widespread, this would de-incentivize the conduct of cultivation.
“Good God! You sound like my old captain, telling me I could not bring a whiskey bottle and a bar girl with me while on patrol, or break the whiskey bottle over the sergeant’s head for strumping the bar girl, because then everyone would do it! What kind of reasoning is that? Does that strike you as fair? You called it Hell, not me! You said Praesepe, and all those other critters out there—Hyades, Ain, you, all you monsters—are being punished. For what? For the suicide of the Forerunners? For the crime of these Forerunners losing a war? How is that a crime?”
Your current symbol-forms have no correspondence to our thinking-forms.
“Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. If Hyades did not will and cause the collapse of this Forerunner race, then you are not responsible for the Orion Arm going fallow. Nor is Earth. So why should Hyades be forced by Praesepe to turn this cosmic wasteland back into a civilized area, all filled with happy Jupiter brains? More to the point, why should we earthmen be forced by Hyades to help you in this crazy project?”
The obligation is imposed upon Hyades because under no likely extrapolation of events will the Hyades polity endure as a coherent thought-system until the desired result obtains.
“Uh. Your current symbol-forms have no copasetic with my stinking-forms.”
Sorry. I’ll try to be clear. I—this entity before you—speaks now as epitome of all Hyades, even as you speak as epitome for all of Sol. Hyades, left to ourselves, would not expend effort on any project whose culmination was beyond our anticipated civilizational lifespan. We would not, for example, channel the flows of interstellar gases to trigger the formation of novae to create the heavier elements needed for the formation of life-bearing planets. However, we received the benefit of a system that plans and acts in larger time scales. The Collaboration seeded this area of the Orion Arm in just such a fashion, without which the elemental composition of the Hyades stars would not have given rise to us.