And he was silent with a mixture of supernatural awe and admiration for Del Azarchel, who, from some clues unknown to history, had deduced so closely the racial and psychological characteristics of Ain and designed his servant race to match. “Not without reason did I worship him as a demigod in my youth,” said Mickey. But he only said it to himself.
9. The Primates of Sol
Del Azarchel, frustrated at a knot of silence he encountered, backtracked to the beginning of his second line of inquiry, concerning the uniqueness of the human race. He began another offshoot thread. He said, “There must be many other omnivorous races under your control. One would assume that any race, once achieving the ability to breed itself or create itself to any desired specifications, would expand its sources of foodstuffs. What, then, makes mankind unique?”
The Authority of M3 has commanded its Dominations of the Orion Arm to breed new races for the trait of being pliant to cliometry. There are races which, because of their innate recalcitrance and their chaotic reproductive or social-transmission methods, lack the long-term stability to adhere to cliometric predictions. These cannot be made part of the Collaboration.
A race like the Patricians, which both uses and opposes cliometry, can only come out of a history chain where two exactly equal cliometric vectors, one for cliometry and one against, cancel each other out and form a third vector sum.
Reading these words, Montrose and Del Azarchel eyed each other warily, speculatively, somewhat surprised. They both realized their actions had set in motion the two vector being described: they were the two forces canceling each other out.
The message continued:
Such a vector solution is so rare that Hyades has no record nor report of another case.
The inhabitants of Sol were contacted and indentured very much earlier than any other race of which we have record. Your race is not old enough to have entirely conformed to the needs of cliometry, nor were you created with cliometric vectors braided into your basic genetics.
We believe your mental template can be used in the process of establishing or reestablishing communication and communion with alien psychological and societal vectors throughout the Orion Arm, Sagittarius Arm, and Galactic Core regions. The most effective method is to transmit complete spiritual and mental information of an emissary in an energy form to any receivers which may by happenstance be open, in hopes that the transmitted mind will be recompiled within the receiving Noösphere, working itself to a position to command sufficient resources and attention to negotiate a mutual exchange of information through neutron information packets.
“So!” said Del Azarchel. “You have solved a mystery that has puzzled our scientists for centuries. Neutrons are well-nigh undetectable. This is the reason why our scientists never detected the radio broadcasts of any extraterrestrial civilizations: you do not use radio except to establish initial contact.”
Inaccurate. Broadcast is inefficient. Interstellar communication is to be by coherent narrowcast of radio laser or x-ray laser to a specific target.
“Yet you made first contact with our race by means of the Monument set in orbit around the antimatter star at V886 Centauri. Why was that?”
Describe this Monument.
“Wait—you mean you did not establish it?”
Describe this Monument.
The mental activity of the moonlet on which they stood, or, rather, had anchored their feet, now reached such a pitch that waste heat, visible to their Patrician senses, began to radiate from the translucent surface of the moonlet.
Del Azarchel, with some help from Torment (and some unintentional interference from Montrose trying to help) described the Monument in great detail.
There was silence for the space of nine hours, the time required for a signal to travel to structures orbiting Ain and return.
10. A Retained Emotion
While they were waiting, Montrose sent a message into the now-hot moonlet core. “It just ain’t possible that, what with Asmodel and then Cahetel, and then the Salamander, Twins of Tau Ceti, and the Beast afflicting the human race at regular intervals every thirteen millennia, you morons never figured out that we got the Cold Equations and our cliometry from your Monument. How can this come as a surprise to you?”
Any insufficient model of the universe will contain information gaps. Surprise is an emotion we retain. Our model of recent events is grossly inaccurate.
Montrose and Del Azarchel sent basically the same message at the same time: “But you knew we had the cliometry equations!”
Of necessity. All civilizations above the first ascension eventually develop them. It was on that basis that Asmodel predicted to cultivate you would produce a return on investment. However, Cahetel argued that your race was grossly and unpredictably underdeveloped in all other areas, indeed, was below ascension, and took only the minimum required tools and armaments for an absolute victory, whereas Asmodel had overestimated your capacities, wasted resources overarming and overequipping, and was duly punished by disintegration.
Montrose was not sure if this referred to something like dissolving a corporation or something like dissolving a man in acid. He did not ask. He was not sure if, to postbiological creatures, there was a distinction.
Instead, he sent, “Didn’t any of your clouds and planets and ice giants you sent across space to us ever report back?”
Of necessity, interstellar expeditions are thrifty to the extreme. Efficiency did not require the remote expeditions to report to the Principality of Ain in precise detail.
Torment said, “There is a translation inaccuracy. Each time Ain says efficiency, we should read the Cold Equations. They are speaking of a legal constraint, not an economic one.”
Both men retroactively rewrote and reread the conversion threads accordingly.
11. The Celestial Beasts of Hyades
Mickey stepped into another aside. He said, “Ask the Principality if its servants were of the same racial origins as itself. Were Asmodel or Achaiah the Beast mound-dwelling limpets like you? Or any of the Virtues you sent?”
No. Asmodel’s remote biological ancestors was a motile epiphyte vine or bromeliad that moved and grew through a larger coral-like forest organism coating its gas giant home world, developing intelligence due to the evolutionary pressure imposed by the need to strategize growth and vampirism throughout a semi-intelligent host without killing or maiming it, and against the vicious competition of others like itself.
Cahetel’s ancestors were evolved from a buried ambush predator akin to your trap-door spider or devil scorpionfish, and this was reflected in its preferred strategy of approach.
Shcachlil’s remote biological ancestors were akin to a vestimentiferan tube worm that bores through the bones of larger organisms and uses them for concealment and protection. Its retreat into the interior of your star may have been based on subconscious racial associative logic at a level unknown to us.
Lamathon was developed from a choanoflagellate sessile fungus organism that is cryptically sexual. As such, it understands both asexual and sexual sociopsychology. At the time, Lamathon presented itself as able to bridge the lack of commonality between your species and ours.