It would be unjust to receive such a benefit without reciprocating.
“And this project, this Sophotransmogrification—I should get a prize for being able to say that two-cubit word—you mean to turn all the worlds into living brains like Jupiter and Tellus, all the moons into Selene, and all the stars into Dyson spheres?”
That is the beginning of the project, yes. Our motive is not hidden: Life serves life.
“Yeah, I got that. Be fruitful and practice your multiplication tables. I got it.”
This universe is a wasteland of dead material. The universe is indifferent to life. Alone, no civilization can survive. Each requires the support and aid and trade and protection from other living civilizations. The wasteland must therefore be filled with life, intelligence, and entities capable of mutual collaboration. We impose servitude on you in order to increase your prospects of survival, and, in the long run, our own.
“But if we did not ask for your help, why not let us go to hell in our own way?”
Had you shown yourself able to maintain a starfaring civilization in your own way, interference would not have been needed. We know you are aware of this, and are acting on the knowledge.
Cahetel was talking about Rania’s expedition. Of course they had seen it. There was no hiding huge, shining, massive objects traveling at near lightspeed from ordinary observation.
Do you claim a moral or legal right to commit your race to extinction, and remove from all neighboring polities, current and future, the benefit of your civilizational contributions?
The entity must have picked up the concept of moral and legal rights from the dead brain of Big Montrose. There was no corresponding symbol for this concept in the Monument or the Cenotaph languages: only reciprocal duties, costs, benefits, expenditures, velocity, acceleration, distance, duration, entropy, and the like.
“Speaking hypothetically, what if I said, ‘we own ourselves’?”
Such a claim would be logically self-defeating: one may only justly destroy an article of possession. If your race is an article of possession, there is no injustice if it is owned by Hyades, for articles of possession have no rights. Without speaking hypothetically now: Do you claim, on behalf of mankind, such a right?
Montrose once again had that sensation of a man who thinks himself far from the edge of a cliff but suddenly notices one foot hanging over an abyss of air. He said carefully, “I claim no such right. My race is not an article of possession.”
We accept this plea and rule that you may not, either through action or inaction, bring about your own extinction. To fail to persevere to colonize the nearby stars constitutes just such an impermissible lapse of duty. Do you agree?
“I agree.” He raised his head. “As the official spokesman for mankind, I hereby state for the record that the human race, now and forever, forswears the right to commit ourselves to extinction through laziness or through dumb-as-a-stump stupidity or for any other reason. Man is great enough to be starfarers. My wife will prove that to you, and so will I.”
The entity made no reply. Then again, Montrose realized he had not actually asked a question. The entity did not know how to accept implied invitations to speak, which occupied so much of polite conversation among humans.
Montrose said, “Answer me one thing more. You are building all these interstellar-sized computers, the Powers and Potentates and Virtues and Hosts and Dominions and Dominations and Authorities—someone is going to use all this calculation power for something. What is the end? What is the purpose of this project?”
We are not told the end.
“If you don’t know the end, why play along?”
Life serves life. We anticipate that the whole of the Orion Arm will wake to self-awareness through the interconnection of many Dominion and Domination library systems circa A.D. 6,400,000, and resume its rightful station as Archon within the Galactic Collaboration. On that day, the component civilizations of the Hyades Cluster, even if long extinct, will be vindicated. By definition the whole will be more aware than any part or precursor. None can serve a greater whole except in ignorance. Shall each live only for himself? If such is the rule of man, we impose a higher rule.
“Damn,” muttered Montrose, as something like a little bubble of clear understanding swelled up in his brain. “You obey laws for payoffs in distant days you will never live to see, and serve higher purposes you don’t understand just because it would be unfair to take without giving.
“You really are civilized, ain’t you? More than I am. Damnation and perdition! I never knew being civilized was so damn creepy.”
9. The Strange Light of Far Suns
It was clear enough, now, what the entity wanted. The Cold Equations that governed the interstellar polity of the Hyades demanded efficiency at all levels. The wastefulness of things like free will and biological life were to be minimized.
But within the pinching limits of those invisible mathematical chains of prediction, efficiency, retribution, and cost, there was room to maneuver. The particular game-theory equation, in this particular circumstance, was simple enough that even Montrose could follow it: Cahetel and Sol were in a position where mutual cooperation was possible. It would actually save Cahetel a small amount of resources if mankind volunteered for the sake of the grand project in which Hyades was engaged. The project of Sophotransmogrification covered thousands and millions of years, and reached through thousands of cubic lightyears of space, and involved unguessed expanses of nebula and suns and worlds.
And for Hyades, and, presumably, for Cahetel, it was not a matter of life and death. No, death was something individual organisms did. This was a matter of triumph or genocide. Whole races, whole star systems, whole civilizations, the unimaginable richness of mental processes throbbing at the core of machines larger than gas giants, all would be degraded and destroyed if the project failed.
(Was there a word for death on a scale larger than genocide? Larger than planetary extinctions? On an astronomical scale?)
So Cahetel was not going to go away and leave mankind alone. The two score or so worlds within a volume of thirty-three lightyears the Equations assigned for Sol at this point in time to colonize were not to be left to go to waste.
He had an aching hunger for more answers. But Montrose, as if by an intuition, knew he would get no more out of the emissary of Cahetel standing before him. The black strands of material elongating from the faceless skull were now seeking out connections with information nodes, control switches, junction boxes, and the like. This nameless creature was mutating from being a negotiator to being a captain. Sedna was preparing for an interstellar journey.
Montrose tapped the serpentine. “Can you connect me to the loudspeakers? I want to talk to everyone left alive and sane aboard this world.”
Two of the screens near him showed him a roster of the personnel. The psychological contour showed such a similarity of mind and memory-chain that Montrose saw no need to interview them each individually.
His voice rang from deck to deck though all corridors honeycombing the little world of rock and ice. “Gentlemen, we are defeated. It has been an honor serving with you. My command had led you to disgrace and loss. If it is any comfort to those who grieve, the Archangel-level version of me is dead, and his memory chains have been vampirized by the enemy.