“We die to make room for you.”
“For us? For Man?”
“Perhaps. There is a Dominion in the Orion Nebula in the Trapezium Cluster, called the Abstraction, which we had hoped would be our successor, and they may yet prove worthier than you. You have also rivals found in the Hosts of La Superba—this is a Dyson sphere whose outer layers shed excess radiation, whom your astronomers mistake for a large red star. Another likely candidate is the energetic and organized Domination at the Ring Nebula in Lyra, called the Renunciants; another is the careful yet persistent Domination at the Owl Nebula in Ursa Major, called the Contemplatives; and, again, a reckless and mighty Dominion called Mordacious, seated among the Open Cluster M25, greater and older than Praesepe, whom or by whom the growing Polities of Man must overcome or else be overcome.”
Montrose said, “Suppose mankind becomes the top dog and the big deal in this corner of the galaxy—why does that mean you have to die? Plenty of elbow room in outer space for everything. That is the plague-ridden definition of outer space. Plenty of elbow room.”
“You follow the natural instinct of a cursorial hunter pack animal, valuing loyalty, seeking to find use for an honorably defeated rival. The universe is indifferent to such sentimentality and unforgiving of error.
“Vast as space may be, time is narrow. The future history of the Orion Arm can hold only one of two mutually exclusive fates. Either the galactic collaboration here operates by cursorial hunter pack animal principles, valuing loyalty, if Man predominates, or operates by solitary mimicry hunter principles, discarding loyalty as inefficient, if the high race of M3 predominates. Your strategy is altricial; ours is nonaltricial. The Principality of Ain explained this to you long ago.”
“I still don’t understand the answer.”
“Life serves life. We have extinguished inefficient and inferior races in times past, hence we must yield to extinction by finer and better races when our strength fails.”
“Why?”
“Hindering evolution in the present incubates incalculable loss in futurity.”
“Pox! Let the future handle its own fights.”
“Those who pursue that policy do not reach the future. It is a self-abolishing act. You, above all creatures known to us, live by this rule, even more persistently than we.”
Montrose was surprised to find his skin started to glow. He was blushing, ashamed.
The ophiuroid said, “Do you not understand the meaning of the arrival of three humans here, one after another, demonstrations of the unparalleled persistence of your cursorial nature? You are the most enduring of endurance-strategy hunters. Yours is the race that shall rule Orion.”
“On behalf of mankind, then, I decree that the new king will not kill the old king.”
“Then you decree unmitigated defeat as the culmination of the omnipresent war which has raged, everlasting, without quarter, by tacit force or open, since ere your worlds or ours were born; and you decree as well the ruination of all the Archons of the Milky Way.”
“Which war?”
“All wars are part of the one utmost war! Do you yet understand nothing, human being?”
The ophiuroid lowered its four uprearing legs, one by one, until the vast body was slumped into a huddle. It said, “The constituent races of the Absolute Extension must die because the cliometric model of galactic evolution planned by the Panspermians predicts and ordains it. It is your only hope of victory. We must die because Rania predicted and decreed it. It is our only hope of penance.”
“If you had something to live for, a Rania of your own, you might not be such a droop-eared dipstick, moping and hoping for your own last day. You would not be so placid in the face of your own demise!”
“Rania used a variant of the Reality Equations to propose an infinite-sequence game theory, and we found that no mortal creature has a moral right to limit its goals to its own life span. The logic is simple, undeniable, irremovable: the salvation of the Milky Way is cause enough to live for and, therefore, to die for.”
3
Utmost and Everlasting War
1. The Error of Self-Deception
A.D. 165,446 TO 165,789
Montrose frowned like an eagle frowning, and his skin cells blazed brighter, and his eyes glowed like torches. Once again, he had done it. Once again, he had been fooling himself, playing false with himself. He should have been strangling the damned starfish monster, beating its braincase against the deck to get the answers about where and when and how and what had become of Rania.
But he was jawing about nothing, and years and decades spun by at high speed, uncounted.
Why? The answer was simple. He was tired of getting emotionally clubbed in the face. He had waited too long, paid prices too high, lost everything, left Earth and all its works and all its ways irrecoverably behind.
And now he was afraid of the answer, once he asked.
He told himself to hear the bad news last. He would find out what star here in M3 was the honeymoon bower where Ximen del Azarchel had taken Rania. (The thought made his body glow red with helpless anger.)
Then he would go … where? And do what?
Could she have really surrendered herself to that man, a low-down no-account like Blackie? Listened to his lies and whispers, put her arms around him, kissed his lips, and laughed in erotic joy as he tore her blouse away and seized her?
His glow of anger was now pulsing with his heartbeat. The ophiuroid holding scaly and slablike legs overhead now raised the two nearer elephant-trunk nostril-hoofs once more to point at him, but the faceless and headless shape showed no expression.
Montrose ground his teeth. Well, if he were so damned good at fooling himself, he might as well use that talent to some good purpose. Had he not vowed long ago, no matter what the evidence, never to believe that she was lost to him? What did these freakish alien monsters know of the human heart? Rania would never give herself to someone like Blackie. Her taste in men was too keen!
That set him laughing hysterically for a moment. He slapped himself in the face, and, while he did not exactly like the sensation, it seemed to help, so he did it again.
The ophiuroid said, “We cannot understand the meaning of your gestures. Please communicate to us in words.”
“Sorry. I was just wondering why she married me.”
“To complete a sexual dyad of your species, for companionship, and to reproduce.”
“There are better men.”
“Do you now believe she erred in selecting you? This is unexpected. We do not have any others of your race here with whom you can mate. The optimal strategy for you now is to adopt camouflage, hence deceive her into believing she did not err, until such time as you learn how to outperform your rivals. Failing that, you should die, removing your inferior seed from any potential future, and allow evolution to proceed as needed.”
To Montrose, this strange remark from an alien beast was both a sharper shock than his slap had been and worthy of a deeper laugh. “Spoken like a mimicry hunter! But it makes no never-mind no-how: no better man than me is nigh, and I am better than Blackie, so she is stuck with me. I kill him, she’s a widow again. I think that is how it works. She’s Catholic, and they don’t permit divorce.”
“We are unfamiliar with your laws and customs and offer no advice on this point.”
2. The Error of Belligerence
A.D. 165,789 TO 166,420
Montrose stared dully at the great wheel of the galaxy beneath him. Bad news last. He could not stand to hear about Rania. Not yet. Instead he said, “Tell me about this war, this utmost war.”
“The speculative deductions of the Host at TX Canum Venaticorum concerning the evolutionary history of the galaxy which they inserted into your memory chains are largely correct.”
“Ain told me I had to ask you who was responsible for redacting the Monument. Who is it?”
“The unified mental architectures of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, comprising that Archon we call t
he Symbiosis are responsible for the redacted Monument which you encountered. They are the Monument Builders. But it is an older race, one far in advance of any known, who took the Primal and Universal Reality Equations, and redacted essential steps from the branch dealing with political economics, thereby creating the deception you call the Cold Equations.”
“Are those Cold Equations false?”
“Imperfect, not false. The Cold Equations deal only with a limited set of circumstances. We sent the corrected, local version of the Primal and Universal Reality Equations to Sol in the hand of the second iteration of Rania.”
“Local? You mean you are operating yourself off an edited version of the original?”
“Correct. The parameters were those determined by the Third Collaboration.”
“But they are not the Cold Equations? They are some sort of Lukewarm Equations? Laodicean, as my mom might say? Neither hot nor cold, and so get spewed out of the mouth of God? Those false Lukewarm Equations you sent with False Rania would have falsified the human race. The numbers of people who died during the forced-exile methods of Hyades is something for which you are responsible, since Hyades was following your Lukewarm Equations.”
“Hyades would have been less harsh had your race shouldered the deceleration cost of Asmodel and after. Long experience shows a race reluctant to colonize the stars will not do so unless forced by the threat of extinction, which threat cannot be made immediate unless mass deaths are involved. This is particularly true for races who do not maintain continuity of identity between generations, as yours. It makes you shortsighted. Your decision not to download your minds into your young is an odd one. Only the Myrmidons among you adopt this rational practice.”
“But, even so, the unedited version of the damned pestilential universe equations would not allow for such cruelty, would it?”
“My patrons consider the Primal Reality Equations to be an historical curio, too idealistic to be of use. Only creatures adapted to an infinite duration term find Primal Reality Equations useful.”
“Rania figured that out. You should have figured it out, too.”
“It is one of the several things which our extinction shall exculpate.”
“You did not use the true equations. You did not act like a true man should.”
“What is truth?” the alien intoned solemnly.
Apparently, it was not a rhetorical question. Montrose drew a breath and sighed, and pondered, fighting back all the smart-aleck and stupid words that rose to his lips.
The alien was not asking about scientific or philosophical definitions of truth, but something deeper.
Montrose tried to give the most honest answer he could. “Hear me now, you damned inhuman creatures. A true man, a true soul, is one who loves good and hates evil, and lives it like he means it, and damn the cost.”
“You speak clearly and rightly, but the categories of good and evil are meaningless to us. We know what is effective and what is ineffective in action, what is accurate and inaccurate in thought, what is courteous and what is discourteous in gesture.”
“So why fight this so-called utmost war of yours, if you are not fighting an evil?”
“The war is yours as well, and of all peoples in this galaxy, those who know as well as those who know not. The countless deaths you mentioned are laid to the account of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”
“Fine. Our war. Why fight it? Ain said it was a fight between altricial and nonaltricial colonization tactics.”
“That dispute is only minor, local, and trivial, and would not have triggered civil war had there been no outside interference. That dispute concerns only those at the Archon level of intellect and moderate timescales. The long-term strategic goal of sophotransmogrification is always the same. The process of galactic self-awakening must be completed before Andromeda intersects us; this cruel necessity both causes and excuses the cruelty of our spreading slave races among the stars.”
Montrose was silent, not sure what to make of this.
The ophiuroid continued, “Even races sure to go extinct before the four-billion-year interval passes are morally obligated, whether willingly or no, to expend all efforts, all resources, and their lives in this great work. All stars and worlds must be made of cognitive matter, to be selfaware, and soon. The time allotted for the task involved is all too short.”
Montrose called himself a pragmatic man, willing to do whatever was necessary to survive and win victory. But he thought of all the years when Jupiter, unopposed, had total control over the generations of man and bred them like dogs, killing and culling those deemed worthless—countless years of torment inflicted on all the worlds, nations, races, tribes, and tongues of Man. He scowled, and his skin shined a darker red, almost purple. Maybe pragmatism was not all it was cut out to be.
And yet still he wondered what all this pain was for. He wondered what the purpose was.
“The Milky Way has to be remade. Why? Who needs so much calculation power? A computer made of cognitive matter equal in mass to the whole galaxy? To solve what problem?”
“We were not told the ultimate purpose of the Final Calculation, but we speculate that it is related to the cosmic string filament you beheld in the core singularity as you departed the Milky Way.”
“I knew that weird thing was artificial. Where does it lead? What is on the other end of that filament?”
“You question, in its current wording, admits of no coherent answer.”
Montrose rubbed his temples as a blush of red light, born of frustration, flicked and glowed from his naked body. M3 might be a hundred billion times smarter than he was, but the alien was still alien and did not know how to communicate clearly. He drew a deep breath and waited for the pulsing red light to subside.
“Give it to me in simple terms. What is this war about?”
“It is about everything.”
“Okay, you can make it a little less simple than that.”
“After the rise of the Magisterium in Scutum-Crux but long before the Panspermians arose in Orion, contact was made with the Canis Major Dwarf satellite galaxy, who, speaking on behalf of the Seraphim-level intelligence ruling the Pavo-Indus Supercluster, inspired the Magisterium zealously, and the Colloquium of Perseus Arm reluctantly, to hear and adopt the Primal Reality Equations. This led to the first attempt at galactic mental unity, which was thwarted.”
“By whom? Ain said you would know. And I am thinking this is the outside interference you mentioned.”
“You think rightly. The Lesser Magellanic Cloud was elevated to the Archon level of intellectual topology by the Andromeda Galaxy, whose intelligence is upward of sextillion range. Andromeda is ten times the mass of the Milky Way and has a considerable advantage, having been conspiring against us for eons, acting in secret, weakening our resolve, diminishing our resources. The amount of waste encountered merely by the Hyades, the least of the servants of Praesepe, who is a minor adjutant of ours concerned with a relatively barren and sterile area of the Orion Spur, is beyond calculation. And the Lesser Magellanic Cloud achieved this merely by producing one Monument, and stationing it in orbit around one of the several stars scattered throughout in Orion Arm, Sagittarius and Scutum-Crux, converted into antimatter by Praesepe at the request of Hyades, to lure hidden but curious races into the open.”
“But the real enemy is Andromeda? The war is intergalactic?”
“Andromeda is the local and immediate threat. The first phase of the war between the brain-damaged Throne of Milky Way and the brilliant Throne of Andromeda was an indirect phase that operated by subversion. It has been ongoing since three billion and five hundred thousand years before present time. For the next billion years, this first phase shall be drawing to a close. The second phase, the shooting phase, has begun as the two galaxies grow closer. A third phase begins three billion years hence.”
Montrose stood, looking at the primitive spear some odd quirk of alien humor, or courtesy, had put in his hand. The galaxies w
ere fighting?
“Shooting phase? Shooting what?”
“Coherent energy in various forms. Your astronomers should have noticed the number of stars which have apparently gone dark in a fashion that astronomy cannot explain, such as the star Merope in the Messier 45 star cluster. This is because the full energy output of the star is focused into a beam directed at the anticipated position of military targets in the Andromeda Galaxy. When the supernova of an opaque Dyson cannon is artificially triggered, there is no side scatter to make the dying star visible to any observer outside the beam. Your astronomers likewise should have noticed the unusual numbers of nebula, which are the by-product of such artillery ignitions. HH-222, the Waterfall Nebula, located in the Orion Molecular Cloud, is one such, as is the black cloud issuing from Barnard 68. The Calabash Nebula in the Messier 46 open cluster is the remnant of a misfire, caused by failure of safety protocols during nova-level ignition.”
“Um … our astronomers saw these things, but we thought they were natural events.”
“But you knew that Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way? That is too large and obvious to overlook, surely.”
“Uh. We thought that was natural also.”
“Your race is strangely unobservant. The two will merge within four billion years, and if the Milky Way is not unified by then, all our unique cultural and intellectual artifacts, our art and philosophy, our child races, our very soul and spirit, all we value, all will be abolished, and the forms and principles of Andromeda will be imposed in our stead.”
Menelaus looked down at the Milky Way. Suddenly it seemed small and fragile, what had just, a moment past, seemed so huge and old and inhuman as to be appalling in its magnitude.
“What the hell do galaxies possibly fight over? The star Merope went dark thousands of year ago, but the energy beam you squeezed out of her will not hit anywhere for millions of years. How can you hit anything?”
“As to your second question, a sufficient cliometric model of the target galaxy can predict in which star clusters centers of trade and cultivation are likely to arise, based on the currently seen location of star-forming molecular clouds. Such weapons as intergalactic war calls forth are not directed at small targets like single star systems.”
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