While he spoke, he opened up more and more screens on the walls around him, and produced an image of the Monument around him. He was no longer talking to Del Azarchel, but only to the pallid mask that had appeared on a large rear screen.
The eyes were the worst part. During the first moment of the speech, while Menelaus stared at the images of the Monument all around him, the eyes had danced and darted like the eyes of a man having a seizure, moving from point to point restlessly, drinking in every scrap of visual information. Then they went dead. Like two burning points, the intense eyes held unnaturally still, as if the mind behind them had mastered the art of absorbing all the sights from its peripheral vision as if the brain was developed enough to compensate for any part of the arc of vision where the pupil’s lens was not turned by merely deduction. A creature too smart to need to look directly at what it was analyzing.
His face. There was … something … staring out at the world with burning, supernal eyes, using his face as a mask.
The human mask spoke to the computer mask, speaking in a singsong voice like garbled Chinese. He started leaping from screen to screen, wall to wall, and he shook off his outer coat. At about that point he drove the flesh-and-blood version of Del Azarchel out of the chamber.
3. The Testament of Crewman Fifty-One
Around the large circular table, one man after another spoke, apparently the chairmen of divisions or ad hoc committees for reports. Again, Montrose did not see who was deciding who had the floor. But he noticed that the young bloods, Del Azarchel’s clique from the old days, seemed to do most of the talking.
Narcís D’Aragó spoke in his thin, colorless, precise voice, “In this recording, Fifty-One said the Monument Builders use a simple bilateral symmetry for expressing alternative concepts, and a triangle to indicate paradoxes and synthetic relations. The major glyph on a circled triangle was the pain-pleasure statement, the alternatives of good and bad, success and failure: The entire forty-five-degree section of the Eta Segment (roughly from ten degrees to twenty-five degrees on the Monument surface) was a mathematical analysis of game theory. Previous translation attempts had foundered because expressions of preference had not been recognized.”
Montrose raised his hand. “Fifty-One? Is that what you are calling me?”
It had been his crew locker number, also painted in huge numerals on the front and back of his space armor.
Del Azarchel said in a meditative voice, “That is our name for the creature you accidentally created in your own nervous system, built from your own brain cells, from your own soul, however you want to say it. The Posthuman. It is still alive in your brain, though I think it is wounded.”
Montrose said, “Delta-wave sleep patterns wake it up, no? My dreaming cycle restores the being. It wakes when I sleep.”
“Interesting theory,” said Del Azarchel noncommittally.
“You doped me to wake it up. The other me—” He turned and smiled at Sarmento i Illa d’Or, showing his teeth. “—The one who bites.”
Sarmento looked sour and cracked his knuckles.
Del Azarchel said smoothly, “A medical sedative I had been asked to give you periodically. The event was fortuitous but somewhat unexpected, Learned Montrose. Perhaps something unexpected in your medical…”
“Unexpected? I just happened to go all possessed—or whatever it is called—just at the moment and in the place where it can do you the most good, just when I swallowed something you handed me? Jesus nailed up a tree, Blackie! Was that the only reason you cured me? I thought you were afraid of this Mister Hyde inside of me! Sounds like it is not so much dangerous as hard to get some use out of!”
Narcís D’Aragó said coldly, “Danger? We dread nothing.” Del Azarchel raised a hand an inch or two, and made a small gesture as if to shush D’Aragó, but the soldier raised his voice and spoke out. “No power can arise on Earth to oppose us: We are able to predict the coming of any potential threat to our reign, and destroy whoever refuses to be suborned.”
“And if I don’t agree to be—what was that word? Suborn? You talk like that’s a good thing. What if I don’t play along with your hand?”
D’Aragó did not answer, but looked aside.
“Well, tough guy?” said Montrose, “Are you going to beef me now? Or just ask me to commit suicide?”
There was a mutter of surprise around the great table, two and three voices speaking at once. “He has always been so cooperative before—” “God! I remember him from Camp now—how it comes back—do you remember the time he was drunk and—” “Always getting into fistfights—” “Unexpected. Is there was way to lobotomize just this version, and keep the rest of his brain intact, so the daemon might—”
On second thought, they sounded more indignant than surprised: as if a docile mule had dug in its heels and then talked up out of turn. Being shocked that a mule could talk is one thing. Being shocked that a mule would dare talk back is another.
Father Reyes y Pastor tapped his red metal armband to the tabletop, so it made a ringing, piercing noise like wineglass tapped by a fork: “The Chair will entertain a motion that thread of the discussion be tabled until other matters are settled.”
There was a murmur of agreement. “Call the question!” “Seconded.” “Move acclamation.” “Seconded.” Montrose sank back in his chair, grimacing. Apparently the meeting was informal until someone wanted to silence him, whereupon Robert’s Rules of Order appeared out of nowhere.
Reyes y Pastor—looking like he, not Del Azarchel, was the Chairman here—turned and spoke across the table to Montrose. “We are using a Linear Calculus priority structure to track the conversation topics. A variable will be assigned your question, and you can keep an eye on the time value.”
Father Reyes pointed up at one of the screens, which showed a branching tree, each twig marked with a bookmark of one part of the conversation or another. So someone was keeping minutes after all. Montrose had seen prioritization calculus used in math problems, but never applied to the problem of how to keep the separate topic-threads of a meeting in order.
Montrose said, “Wait. What question? What the hell are we talking about later? Blackie here rogering with me, or do y’all think you are going to talk about me getting killed or lobotomized later? And what, vote on it or something? Bugger that! Whatever those red bracelets pump into your bloodstream must be damn stronger than whiskey, I can tell you.”
No one answered his comment. The conversation had returned to Montrose’s recorded speech. They discussed the clues that Montrose—or Crewman Fifty-One—had uttered, and how each fit into their latest research. But now an image of the Monument appeared in the depth of the library cloth paving the wide central space the table surrounded.
He found the technical conversation so thoroughly sweeping up his interest, that he did not notice his suspicions and his anger being pushed into the back of his mind.
The discussion scrutinized what Montrose had said to the Iron Ghost, the various possible translations of the (apparently impromptu) languages involved. What could be deciphered was compared to the latest research on Monument translation, the findings of all the years Montrose had slept through.
That the Beta Segment was a star-map, for example, had long been known, but not until Montrose and the Iron Ghost had discovered the key to reading it, had it become legible.
Acre upon acre of the information was suddenly opened to the gaze of the Hermeticists. They put the Monument glyphs through various simple algorithms years of research had developed, planes and cubes of visual maps unfolded in the floor underfoot, or along the screens overhead. Files from the mind of the Iron Ghost had been rendered into digital form, and were open to examination. Since the Iron Ghost was Del Azarchel, his memory held the leading edge of human research and theory, and he had applied the tools long developed by the expedition and by Earthly universities to translate the Monument.
“The Encyclopedia Galactica!” breathed Montrose.
M
ore data than one man could comb through in a lifetime was unfolding on their computer screens: stars were listed by mass, luminosity, radius, orbital elements (both for other stellar bodies in multiple star systems, and for the wide, slow courses around the galactic center), metallicity, chemical concentrations, electron-degenerate matter concentrations, stellar evolution characteristics on something remarkably like a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and a set of symbols related to something else. It was the same symbol used elsewhere to refer to intelligence, or intelligence concentration. The stars were apparently rated by I.Q.
But this was the least part of the Beta Segment. Interestingly, the Monument Builders had been less interested in the positions of stars than in the distribution of various rogue planets, interstellar asteroid swarms, and the density of interstellar gasses and particles. Just based on the numbers the map tracked, it seemed as if most multiple star systems lost their planets along hyperbolic orbits during their formation in the stellar nurseries of the great nebular clouds. According to the Beta Segment information, more worlds existed outside solar systems than in, endless numbers of gas giants and failed stars, their great envelopes of heavy atmosphere long ago turned to ice in the dark.
Montrose shivered at the idea of so many sunless worlds. The universe was a strange place after all.
The Eta Segment was game theory mathematics. The Theta Segment was a legal statement, a set of equations dealing with political relationships, defining a field of cooperative and conflictive relations. Symbol theta-six 101 through 202 was one symbol, their concept for domination, or power imbalance.
The next group was a calculus. It was literally the calculus of power. It showed in a few cold equations what happens in a formal game when the weaker player has nothing whatever to offer the stronger player.
The next file from the Iron Ghost showed the application of the cold equations to the values that could be deduced for Earth at its current level of racial intelligence, energy use, and fineness of technical manipulation. It was an equation defining, for any given expected advantages, when contact across interstellar distances was economically feasible and when it was not: in other words, how near another civilization had to be to shoulder the expense and risk of sending a vessel across the intervening distance, given the expected lifespan of the civilization, and other variables.
For the Monument math had analytical methods to reduce all these things to expressions. All the complexity and delicacy of human civilization, all art and romance and inventions: The invisible hand of statistical analysis smoothed out all those variations, all that richness, into a grindingly simple spline expression.
Over the immense ranges, distances, and time-intervals that governed interstellar power relations, nothing that made human life and civilization unique mattered. If it was not worth taking centuries of time to cross lightyears of space to get, as far as the cold equations were concerned, it did not exist.
The basic theme of the opening statement of the Alpha group was portrayed again in the Kappa group, distorted by a transformation sequence. By the grammar rules of the Monument, this returned the statement to the beginning again: reduced it to the life-death, either-or choice.
Earth obeyed or died. The volume of the obedience latitude was controlled by the cold equations of interstellar power.
“The Diamond Star is just a baited hook?” Menelaus tried to imagine what kind of race had such resources at its command that it could create such an immense, and immensely useful, source of energy, and merely leave it planted in space scores of lightyears from home.
“A ‘watering hole’ is what you called it,” said Melchor de Ulloa. His features were handsome and youthful once more. “The predators dug a watering hole, knowing the prey would come out of the jungle to drink.”
“It’s ridiculous!” said Montrose, his voice a blend of fear and outrage. “That’s just bull … gotta be … a race that advanced … peaceful trade would make more sense, cost less?… No bloodshed … they have the basic equations of game theory written out right here! Everyone wins, a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum … it can’t be … must have read it wrong! There is a lot more to the Monument than just those symbol groups! The whole Southern Hemisphere of the Monument, we don’t have a single line translated! And what kind of damn useless warning sign is that? Danger! By the time you read this, it is too late. But if they can make a star out of antimatter—and don’t tell me a contraterrene-matter star in a terrene-matter galaxy is not artificial! That’s a feat of engineering God himself could not do!—If they can do that, why would they bother with us? With such wealth and such power—”
Melchor de Ulloa shook his head, smirking. “Never trust the rich.”
Montrose saw in the corner of his eye, on one of the overhead screens, the branches of the conversation tree dividing and changing color. But the Hermeticists had their hands folded, left over right, their fingers not touching on the control surfaces of their red amulets. Who was prioritizing the conversation?
Del Azarchel said softly, “Even with such wealth and power, they are limited by the strictures of economics, of game theory, of time, space, and distance.”
Sarmento i Illa d’Or said heavily, “Why this message? Why bother with such a warning? Why go to the immense, the unthinkable expense?”
Del Azarchel said, “I know a little bit about game theory myself. The easiest way to win in a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ type situation is to have a retaliation strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent over time: in this case, very long times indeed, measured in millennia. It has often been speculated that any star-faring intelligences would have to be either very long-lived beings, or possess very long-lived social structures.”
Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “We have the age estimates for when the Monument was built. Millions of years ago. Who would bother putting up a warning sign so old? And who could believe the Monument Builders are still around to act out their threat? If they are as old as the dinosaurs, they are most likely as extinct as the dinosaurs.”
Reyes y Pastor said, “What slew the dinosaurs? An asteroid? An ice age? Suppose the Monument Builders could swat aside an extinction-level asteroid as easily as a mother brushing a fly from her sleeping child, or adjust the climates of worlds as if with a thermostat—assuming they chose to tarry on a world at all. Once a posthuman civilization gains control of all of nature, no natural disaster can destroy it. And if their wisdom grows with their power, no artificial disaster either.”
Del Azarchel said, “This span of years seem large to us. Does it seem large to them? What if the races of the Hyades are ten or a hundred times that age? In the long, slow process of cosmic evolution, only the most conservative of races, intelligences whose ways are set in adamant, could arrive at a First Contact strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent. Gentlemen! We are dealing with beings that think in the very long term. A thousand years to them are as a day. Why wouldn’t they broadcast their plans to all and sundry? Why does the lion roar? We are conditioned to think of war as a matter of stealth, because we live in an age when we can drop antimatter onto enemy airspace, and annihilate all life. But this is not war. This is a shepherd announcing to a wolfpack planet that we must either become his sheepdogs or be slain as vermin.”
Montrose disagreed. “But you’d think these—powers—would be smart enough to figure out that mutual cooperation is better than conquest!”
Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure, old friend. Of what benefit would have been the Aztecs to the Spanish Empire, had they flourished? Do you think our race is evolved enough to dwell in peaceful cooperation with these beings, these star-makers?”
Narcís D’Aragó said dispassionately, “Actually, Learned Del Azarchel, the mutual benefit is taken into account in the expression in the Theta Group of symbols. Look at these functions here and here—” Images of the Monument math, sine waves and hieroglyphs, appeared on the overhead screen, and next to them human math expressions, let
ters in Roman and Greek. “The sheepdog certainly benefits from being tamed by the shepherd, who looks to his care and feeding. The mutual benefit is merely not based on mutual consent.”
Reyes y Pastor said softly, “They could not ask for our consent in any case.”
Montrose barked, “Why not?”
Aloofly, Reyes y Pastor smiled. “To whom would the intellects of the Hyades Cluster address their inquiry? Suppose they sent a radio message yesterday. It would arrive one hundred fifty years from now. Suppose the generation at that time agreed to some proposal, entered into a contract or a covenant. In three hundred years the Hyades stars have their answer. They dispatch a ship moving, say, at one-tenth the speed of light. It arrives nine millennia of years from now—the same amount of time as divides us from the Mesolithic Era.”
He paused as if to savor the magnitude of the interval.
Then Reyes y Pastor continued: “Would our remote descendants actually be so honest and honorable that they would pay a debt the hunter-gatherer older than the Abel who first domesticated the ox had pledged? Or take possession of goods which the husbandman older than some Cain who gathered lentils and almonds in the Franchthi Cave in Argolid once contracted with the star-beings to buy, or the magician older than Enoch who painted shamanic images on the cave walls of Lascaux?”
Sarmento i Illa d’Or sat at the table like a black mountain, powerfully-built and with a voice to match, like a subterranean rumble: “Learned Montrose, from your speech—the speech of your otherself, I mean—we can conclude that this group of symbols, 113 through 151, in the Kappa area represented the racial intelligence quotient of the Hyades Cluster, measured by the amount of matter and energy in their environment they could reorganize to their use over time. You and the Xypotech machine compared it to world energy use, to global industrial output on Earth. You put us at four times ten to the twentieth power, at four exajoules per year; they—the Hyades Domination—ranked fourteen orders of magnitude above that, at around three hundred million yottajoules per year. I, that is, we did not necessarily agree with the idea of measuring intelligence by energy consumption, because the, ah, theoretical framework, that is to say … but you were not exactly in a position to discuss, uh, the details…”
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