Montrose said, “What about the energy or information flow or whatever it was Ain says touched Rania?”
Torment said, “Nothing in the definition of a black hole says that signals from outside do not fall in. Infinite games are now possible, games with no last move.”
Montrose said, “Mickey is superstitious, and Blackie is a bastard, so it falls to me to ask the skeptical question. What makes you think the Ain is right about the universe being artificial? Excuse me, timespace—as if that made a damned difference.”
Torment said, “Simply because I am an artificial world called Septfoil entering an artificial star system called Ain in what is apparently an artificial star cluster called Hyades, it would be abrupt of me to assume I know what larger structures around me are not also artificial. Also, the distinction does make a difference. Had Ain said that the universe was an artifact, and defined the universe to mean all that exists, it would have been illogical, because the artificer must also be part of all that exists. Ain proposes that all things within the lightcone of our local Big Bang are a by-product of an intelligent design, by proposing an ulterior to that lightcone, which is perfectly in keeping with the standard model of physics. Ain is absurdly superior to me in intelligence, but even I can tell the difference between a statement that cannot be true because it contradicts itself and a statement that may or may be true, because it does not.”
Montrose said, “Second skeptical question: Even if there is an ulterior, how can there be infinite games inside our finite continuum, or lightcone, or whatever you want to call it. Eh?”
Torment said, “How long will you pursue Rania before you give up hope?”
“What kind of bunghole puss-drippy question is that, lady? Never.”
Torment said, “And if the universe ends before you succeed?”
“I’ll break the damned universe, if it gets in my way.”
“So you see,” said Torment, “you are a player in an infinite game. There is no other end result for you, aside from finding her again. And once you have found her, what then? Does the love that prompted this pursuit cease, once it is no longer needed? No. Love is an infinite game. It admits of no selfishness, no shortsightedness. Anyone who makes a self-interested move in that game breaks the rules.”
Del Azarchel said, “All very romantic and sentimental, I am sure, but let us return to the horrible truth at hand. We just discovered everything in our lives and all the countless human civilization since the first Hermetic expedition returned were all falsehoods. And Rania’s ability to use the Monument math to bring peace, to find impossible solutions to the—” A second look of shock passed over his features. “No! What she did was simple. She treated all the situations like an infinite game. Wars have victory conditions, final moves, but peace does not. Dear Mother of God! How could I miss it! How could I have been so blind!”
Torment said, “I can stimulate the symbol sequence buried in this emissary moonlet, if you want to hear Ain tell you. But I have deduced it. It was the second absent equation.
“There is no provision in the Cold Equations,” Torment continued, “no mathematical expression given anywhere on the Monument, for what happens when two players both by convention agree to treat a finite game as an infinite one. If the punishment for violating the convention is greater than the reward for treating the game as finite, the convention will continue, even if the convention is but a legal fiction and game in truth is finite. What if Ain and Sol had acted as if they were to be neighbors for an infinite amount of time? Would not the long travel distances, the thousand-and ten-thousand-year journeys, be no longer an excuse for conquest and exploitation? Any cruelty visited by one on the other would eventually provoke retaliation, would it not?”
Del Azarchel and Montrose stared stupidly at each other, and Montrose stared stupidly at the blank face mask of Mickey’s conical helmet.
Torment said, “A child could have seen it, but no one who examined the Monument had the innocence of a child. Every examiner, human or machine, accepted the unspoken assumptions of the Monument Redactors. They calculated, and correctly, that we would automatically assume space is too large and time too long for mutually beneficial relationships. This Monument was edited in order to fool any race young enough not to have developed the cliometric calculus independently. This Monument fooled our race in the same fashion as we have fooled ourselves countless times in history: by thinking in the short term.”
“Why?” asked Del Azarchel. “What could possibly be their motive? And who?”
Torment said, “You are already calculating how to take your revenge?”
Del Azarchel said with a smile, “Think of it as an infinite game. There is no final move until all who offend me suffer infinitely.”
13. Archon and Authority
Eventually a response came from the main mass of the dendrite clouds coating the Ain star system.
The Monument you describe cannot have been produced by any intellect of the same order of being as Ain, a Principality, nor Hyades, a Dominion, nor Praesepe, a Domination. As for intellects of superior ranks to this, Messier 3 and above, all models and extrapolations approach a singularity, and they are undiscoverable.
The intelligence needed to create an alternate system of cliometry, the so-called Cold Equations of which you speak, to give your race false axioms and false conclusions and nonetheless have this false system map so accurately onto known galactic cliometry that your dominion, Triumvirate, could not detect the deception—is very likely higher than the quintillion range of the Authority in M3 in Canes Venatici. Ergo we are confronted by a malign intellect most likely in the intellectual range of the immediate superior of M3, if not more. Posit a ten-quintillion range intellectual system.
Torment said, “Who is this superior? Mankind has heard no rumor of such an entity. Whom does M3 serve?”
M3 serves the dead Archon of Orion, who served life.
Del Azarchel demanded a more detailed explanation than this cryptic comment. The response was:
At one time, the combined efforts of the Orion civilizations seeded the immediate area of the Orion Spur with prebiotic and protobiological material, which was seeded to various small, rocky planets of small yellow stars—which is not a statistically likely place for life naturally to arise. Call them the Panspermians. They were shattered in war, and some surviving elements, broken logic diamonds larger than gas giants, fled across the wide interrupt between this arm and the Sagittarius Arm.
The ghosts of the Panspermians discomforted the Circumincession, requiring a stricter protocol against trespass—an event whose negative side effects you yourself once experienced.
Del Azarchel said, “How did you know that happened to me?”
The Circumincession placed or impressed an imperative into your matter-energy necessity-volition manifold an entity of your order necessarily carries with it, and the signs of what was asked of you are visible to intellects of my order. You were told to give a message to Orion, to which you have made no attempt, so far, to comply.
Del Azarchel said, “Sagittarius Arm commands the barbarians of Orion Arm to never trespass into the civilized stars, but to attend to our business here.”
Not for us is this message meant.
“Then for whom? Not the Panspermians—you said they were no more. For M3?”
Yes.