“At this time I am negotiating surrender terms. Cahetel will take control of the Black Fleet, and use the fifty worldlets to deracinate the Earth, and the colonies of experimental humans on Venus, and the penal colony of the Space Chimera on Mars. Then the worldlets will spread sail and head out for those worlds we were long ago told it was our fate to torture into Earth-like shape, and to torment our children into adapting to. This includes exile to the twenty-six worlds of the Second Sweep, and it includes pilgrimage to the fifteen worlds of the twelve stars in the First Sweep, where we can bury the dead and continue the terraforming and pantropic enterprises your ancestors against their will began.
“However, the Cahetel entity would prefer volunteers to unwilling victims.
“The disasters of the First Sweep speak for themselves. I am prepared to offer the entity that if it will undertake to prevent Jupiter from extending control over these forty Stepmother Earths, volunteers willing to escape the tyranny of life under the Power of Jupiter can be found.
“Cahetel has sufficient mass to convert part of its substance to murk, creating a mind able to resist the cunning of Jupiter. It could sit in the sun like a Salamander in a campfire—we know that Hyades knows how to build structures able to withstand that environment—and be out of Jupiter’s reach. The Salamander could be given direct control of the Gravitic-Nucleonic distortion rings, and so would control both radio-laser communication and launching and deceleration energy for sailing ships hereafter.
“It is a simple deal. The First Sweep showed that we humans, biological humans, are more efficient when it comes to the dirty, low-tech business of breeding and dying on a frontier and taming a world. All we want in return is freedom. No more children taken away from mothers to go into the Venus pits of Jupiter’s servants. No more genocides of races and bloodlines deemed unfit. That is what the colonies will have. It will be hell, but it will be a hell of our making. It will be ours, and—more important—we will be ours. Each man will own himself.
“And, in return, the critter living in the sun, the Salamander, just won’t let Jupiter run things to suit himself. The Salamander will be told to take orders from humans living outside the Noösphere, because we are the only ones going to be living and dying on the new worlds.
“I don’t know what Cahetel will say. It may be more expensive to do what I am suggesting than whatever resources are saved by winning our willing cooperation. Maybe the Salamander would have to be special ordered from manufacturing back at Epsilon Tauri, in which case, we will not see this deal come through until roughly the Thirty-seventh Millennium, when the Hyades returns again for the Third Sweep.
“I do not know, gentlemen of the Myrmidon race, how much of your master and creator Del Azarchel lives in you. He would be willing to think along those time scales, and to plan out the generations by the hundreds and by the thousands. And your race is unlikely to flourish on these new worlds—the primitive conditions will make it impossible to repair, replace, or manufacture the Aurum substance of your thinking peripheries. The Swans may also prove maladaptive. But both the Second and the Third Humanities can help the first few generations of Firsts get a foothold, and, in time, there will be second expedition to each of these stars, and third, and long after that, regular trade, and enough of a foothold of civilization that the less robust and more complex forms of man could also spread out.
“You see, if your master Del Azarchel brings back even half the contraterrene I expect, Sol will be rich enough to be able to fund a fleet of star vessels, and will be able to spin up the starbeams.
“You can stay here, and go into suspension with me, and live to see the end of these great events. Or you can stay aboard, go out and create the future I am describing, and never see Earth again, and be buried under the strange lights of far suns.
“I am going to use that tinfoil bubble lifeboat the mutineers so thoughtfully provided. It will take me nearly a century to reach the inner system again. So I should be just in time to greet Blackie when he arrives.
“What will I tell him, gentlemen? What do I tell your father? Will I say another generation of slaves were carried off against their will to die on alien worlds? Or will I say his children leaped into the throat of Hell, and tamed those worlds, and made them ours?
“My command ended in death and failure. I am not qualified to make this decision. Effective immediately, I resign my commission as commander-in-chief and abdicate my position as your Nobilissimus.
“Now hear this: I have loaded the cliometric parameters of the future I just described, written out all nice and neat in Monument notation that Cahetel can read, and placed it in the public channels of Sedna, in those areas of the infosphere Cahetel has not corrupted with murk.
“I believe in democracy. I have just now set the channel to broadcast the offer to Cahetel if the majority of you so indicate. I have locked the channel, so that I can neither interfere nor stop you, no matter which way you decide.
“It is your future, your vote, your verdict, your fate. You are the masters of your world, now. You are the judges of this present age.”
The screen immediately showed a unanimous decision. The serpentine hummed as the “plea” was offered to Cahetel.
The entity said no word of agreement, but at that same moment, the broadcast towers and horns controlled by the black substance oozing from the giant corpse began sending signals to the fifty worldlets of the Black Fleet, and a powerful beam was directed toward the main mass of Cahetel itself, still half a lightyear away. Instrument readings showed the pulses carried the fluctuations consonant with notation for the cliometric code Montrose had written. The emissary was given the offer to the Cahetel cloud.
But it would not wait for a reply. As best Montrose could guess, the whole Collaboration from Cahetel to M3 and beyond operated on what might be called speed-of-light federalism. Decisions had to be made locally, and whoever was around decades or centuries later, got the rewards or punishments for that decision. So the major decision structures were reduced, as far as possible, to algorithms propagated to each servant race and servant, telling it how to weigh and make decisions.
Nor did Cahetel make any announcement of agreement. From its inhuman point of view, apparently it was more efficient merely to start carrying out its side of the bargain without bothering to confirm the covenant by any further formality. Presumably, if mankind did not live up to mankind’s side of the bargain, some terrible vengeance would fall upon some remote generation in the far future, just as the cliometric equations shared between them specified.
But human psychology required ceremony.
Montrose drew a deep breath, and sent the words ranging over the loudspeaker, “Know ye all men by these presences that by their solemn oath and sacred honor, the Potentate emissary for the Virtue Cahetel, sent from the Domination of Hyades, the Dominion of Praesepe, and the Authority at M3 in Canes Venatici, and the officers and crew of the memory chain called Dissent, an emanation from the most noble and ancient Ximen del Azarchel, of the Third Humanity called Myrmidons, on behalf of all the peoples, races, nations, tongues, and machines of the Solar System, and also of Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis, collectively called The Empyrean Polity of Man, have this eighth day of August, the feast day of holy Saint Dominic Guzman, Year of Our Lord Twenty-four Thousand One Hundred One, entered into a solemn and indestructible covenant to their mutual benefit, pleasure, and advantage, the terms whereof are binding on them and their generations forever. Witnessed this day by Menelaus Illation Montrose, vagabond. Nolite Vexare Texam!”