The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  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.

  The composition or history of Nahalon is unknown. Any query would of necessity be directed to 20 Arietis, or whoever the ultimate originator of that expedition was within the Hyades hierarchy.

  Achaiah was descended from cursorial hunting creatures whose practice of pack cooperation and endurance hunting made them, of all candidates available to the Principality of Ain, the most akin to your own in psychology and social organization. Unfortunately, as with most carnivorous races, their social strategies are of limited range and somewhat antisocial.

  Mickey said aloud, “The star monsters were a vampire orchid, a trap-door spider, a bone worm, a mushroom, and a hyena, all sent to our world by their master, a colony of whelks and winkles. Even if, for a million years, their biological ancestors have all been ghosts, these machine beings would still continue to be insurmountably different from each other. I have a strange intuition that the agents Ain sent to Sol did report back but that Ain did not understand the reports.”

  12. Finite Games and Infinite

  Montrose said, “My whole life, all these years—the aliens never knew we had translated the Monument. They did not know there was one. Hyades is not the Monument Builders, nor Praesepe, nor M3. What does it mean?”

  Torment said, “It means all our lives have been based on a falsehood.”

  Montrose and Del Azarchel, each in a different way, and with different degrees of obscenity said, “I don’t understand.”

  Mickey said, “I do. Nobilissimus, Meany, divine Torment, my conversation with Ain revealed that there was no reason to send Rania to M3. The Cold Equations allow for a second method to prove our ability to cooperate with a star-faring civilization—all we had to do was cooperate. The invasion of which we were warned was only a last resort, should we refuse to share the burden of the expense for any expeditions approaching our world. That we were obligated to greet them with gifts, as equals greet equals, was an expression missing from the notation, and therefore neither of you, nor the Swans, nor the Myrmidons made any such attempt.”

  For once, Montrose did not swear. He wept, and the tears turned to ice on his cheeks.

  For once, Del Azarchel had no notion of how he should appear before other men or before the eyes of history. His face was utterly blank, like the face of a man who suffered a lobotomy. Eventually, after what might have been a short time or a long, Montrose whispered, “It was all unnecessary? Every damned thing we did?”

  Del Azarchel said, “We knew the Monument had been redacted, edited, and yet we did not know what was missing. The Cold Equations are based on mathematical models of the mind—there were no missing steps, no errors, and the equations balanced! An interstellar civilization must be ruthless and pitiless if it is to maintain itself across such an abyss, across such spans of time. What did the redactors leave out? What was missing?”

  Torment said, “The time value was set artificially low.”

  Del Azarchel said, “What?” It was a snarl.

  Torment showed them several of the cliometric equations she had stolen from the newborn human Dominion, Triumvirate. Then, she ran a trial of the same equations, again and again, each time increasing the amount of time under consideration until it was infinite. With each trial, the Concubine Vector, the margin where a certain degree of exploitation and sharp dealing was allowed between unequal partners, slowly shrank and shrank.

  Montrose said, “It’s the long run. In the long run, honesty is the best policy, eh? But mathematicians have known about that little curiosity for years, centuries, longer. The long-run conditions never obtain, because the cost for waiting for the long run get higher the longer the long run runs—”

  Torment said, “A child could have seen it.”

  Montrose said, “So how come we did not see it? How come all us genius thinkers missed it?”

  Torment said, “We failed to question our assumptions, which is a mental knack that does not depend on intelligence for operation but on innocence of perception.”

  “What assumptions?”

  She said, “The Concubine Vector equations were written on the Monument as if they seemed to be a logical corollary, and the only logical corollary, the basic mathematical expressions of law, morality, semantics, and logic. But we were reading a Monument with a crucial bit of logic missing. The missing axiom is the difference between a finite and an infinite game.”

  She showed them a simple game-theory equation, where the final move of any game, being anticipated by the players, would be taken into account in the penultimate move, and that move again be anticipated by the antepenultimate move, and so on for all the moves.

  Since the final move of any game put the player beyond the retaliation of any further moves, each was under a strong incentive to be shortsighted and self-serving during that last move. But the move before that, anticipating this shortsightedness, was likewise under an incentive to be shortsighted, and so on. It was this shortsightedness, the mere fact that some crimes would never be punished, some insults never avenged, that permitted such acts to be perfectly rational strategies. In any finite game, all players had a final move.

  Hence, all games allowed for at least some noncooperative moves. By analogy, all laws, even those that obtained between distant stars, had to allow for some degree of leniency and mercy, and some debts be forgiven. Some crimes to go unpunished, some relationships be permitted of one-sided exploitation: a Concubine Vector.

  Del Azarchel said, “I have studied this math and all its mysteries since before the technology to create your remotest ancestor, Exarchel, whom I still miss, was but a daydream, less than a twinkle on my eye and blank space on my drawing board! There is nothing in the Monument equations all human thinking systems have not examined thoroughly. How could we have not seen this?”

  Torment answered, “All terms and ramifications present in the Monument math has been examined, both by you when the Monument was first discovered, and again since the return of the doppelganger of Rania. But, on the other hand, by definition, what is absent—that is, not present, canno
t be examined thoroughly.”

  “What is absent?”

  She said, “Two things are absent. First, mathematicians have looked at infinite games only as a curio, an oddity with no real-world application. This is based on a false idea of reality. For the Principality of Ain this day revealed that timespace is an artifact. There is an ulterior region where the architects of timespace, whatever their purposes be, benign or malign, must reside. They are not limited to our eleven dimensions, nor bound by our local arrow of time. There is not necessarily any final move for any game where these ulterior beings are a player, where their moves, any of their moves, affect the structure of incentives surrounding any interactions within the game. Merely by creating the chessboard of the cosmos, these ulterior architects, if they exist, have altered the incentive and rules of all games and interactions within the system.”

  Del Azarchel said, “You speak of God. He can eliminate sin and evil by His divine providence. By miracle, if He wished. He obviously does not wish, therefore it is left to men of vision to battle and constrain the evils innate in the universe until the end of time.”

  Torment said, “I am agnostic on all issues where no information exists. I speak only of the possibility that Ain is correct, and we are all dwelling inside a singularity, a cosmos-sized black hole. I note that, technically speaking, a black hole is defined as any spacetime from which light cannot escape. I note also that, thanks to the Hubble expansion, the farther a particle is from any observer, the more rapidly it recedes. Hence any particles beyond a given radius—roughly fifteen billion lightyears—are receding from any observer inside the lightcone of the Big Bang at a velocity in excess of lightspeed. No possible signal from any observer inside the lightcone of the Big Bang could reach such a receding particle beyond that radius. Hence, by this definition, the continuum is indeed a black hole.”

  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.

  “Who and what is M3?”

  M3 constitutes the regency of the Orion Spur wilderness, until such time as a worthy native government arises—that is, an Orion Archon self-created out of the scattered civilizations and ghost planets here, able to repay the cost of ascending them to sapience. Despite being remote from Orion, the dominions of M3 were awarded this task and combined and elevated themselves to the mental plateau of an Authority. The evolution to this station took place quite recently—the time value, given in terms of periods of radioactive particle decays, put the date somewhere in the middle of the Carboniferous Era Earth, when the first shark ruled the sea, and, on land, the first primitive tree reared its crown—Like mankind, M3 won freedom from indenture by sheer force of singlemindedness.