Zoraida looked at a loss. “Is this cognitive matter? If so, it should be gathered into some far place, for it cannot be destroyed.”

Del Azarchel was disturbed. “Madame, I mean no disrespect, but you have been conquered by a force so superior to us, that you are unaware of the conquest.”

Montrose said, “He’s just sad because he hates to see freedom enjoying itself. Pay him no mind. It ain’t much of a conquest if the conquerors never give orders, never say nothing, is it?”

Zoraida’s look was slowly stiffening into a look of fear. “But they did.”

“Did what?” asked Montrose.

“Give orders.” Zoraida shook her head sadly, and raised her arm. Clasped around her wrist was a heavy bracelet of red metal, a twin to the band on the wrist of Del Azarchel. “I can read the Monument by adjusting my brain chemistry to the levels which you two discovered in prehistory. I was one of those few, in my youth of long ago, posted to the surface of the world during the invasion. I saw with my own eyes what was written on the hull of the skyhooks. I saw more than one lower its endless length through the thunderstorms to crack the earth in lava spouts, and pull all the works of man into its mouth, and millions of men and tens of millions. I read the hieroglyphs written on the hulls. Life is enslaved to life.”

Montrose said, “We heard a slightly different translation. But what does that mean?”

Del Azarchel said, “I assume it refers to the process Rania dubbed Sophotransmogrification. Am I correct?”

Zoraida nodded and said, “You are. What was written on the skyhook hulls was an excerpt from the Cold Equations. The message said that all matter and energy is wasteful if it is not put to the service of life. The aliens are driven by one simple and terrible purpose. To alter what is called the Encephalization Ratio of the galaxy: this is the proportion between thinking mass and nonthinking mass.”

Del Azarchel and Montrose both understood the concept. A man’s body is only one part in forty of cognitive matter, since only the organ of the brain thinks. The rest is for life support. But even that was not the true ratio, because the cattle and the land on which the cattle graze or fish and the sea in which the fish swim or the crops and the soil in which the crops grow, are also used for support of those few thinking cells. The ratio when the whole atmosphere, the rocky and liquid core of the planet, and all matter needed for those crops and cattle was included was immense. An entire unthinking world used all its mass to sustain a few kilograms of gray matter in the human skull. But if the core of the world were rod-logic crystal, the ratio was reversed, and the continents and oceans and atmosphere of the surface became an insignificant unthinking skin on a titanic mass of thought.

Zoraida continued, “Upon us the Hyades wished to impose a moral absolute: it is not right that so much should be dead in order that so little should be self-aware. With the growth of a blanket of self-awareness in the hydrosphere…” (She bowed to Del Azarchel.) “… and a core of self-awareness filling the world’s interior…” (She bowed to Montrose.) “… it pleased the Hyades to uproot our many peoples and cities and societies and fling them to the stars, that we might serve this purpose forever hereafter. Had the two of you not proved to the aliens that we humans have the ability to create new forms of sophotransmogrified life, it is more than likely we would have been ignored, and the expedition returned in failure to its home star in Taurus, never to meddle with us again.”

Montrose and Del Azarchel stared at each other.

“You provoked the aliens by mining the Diamond Star,” said Montrose to Del Azarchel, “But they would have just gone away, if I had not created Pellucid at the core of the world? That don’t sit right.”

Del Azarchel smiled a cruel smile. “You created Pellucid out of fear of Exarchel, which I created out of fear of you. Perhaps I should be grateful that you opposed me! Evolution proceeds through war. It stirs the survivors to greatness.”

“Greatness? The Hyades just stole more than half the globe. We caused it, and you smile. How do you live with your stinking self, Blackie?”

“I fix my eyes on the future. Regret is for the weak.”

Montrose turned to Zoraida. “Why spread our life around? Why not their own?”

“The glyphs on the skyhooks did not say. Perhaps the Hyades also spread their own colonies, at a higher cost of resources, from their own people,” said Zoraida. “All that the message glyphs written in the hulls of the slave ships revealed was that the life of man is cheap. Hyades did not spend any resources building us. We are a windfall.” She tapped the temple of her skull. “To find the human race is like finding a billion cheap computer chips made of meat lying in the wild wood, unattended.”

Del Azarchel said, “But then we spread our culture, not theirs. Humans, not Hyades, occupy more stars.”

Zoraida said, “No doubt the corn seed says the same thing about the farmer and his children. In this case, we are seed which grew too many thorns, and scratched their grasping hands. I interpret the Cold Equations to say that they will not return for a second sweep. Can we not trust the Monument in this? We repelled them. Mankind will be left to our own devices forever after: free, ignored, unhindered.”

Del Azarchel said, “But Amphithöe said the opposite. She said the aliens departed at their will, not that they were repelled.”

Zoraida said, “Those of the First Comprehension operate from limited information, and supply the defect from their own imaginings. Of course, one theory is that Hyades did not linger because our race is too belligerent to survive the long aeons needed to be servants useful to them. They will not come again because, by the time they return, the world will be overrun by rats and roaches, and all our cities empty—I do not speak what I myself hold true. This is the theory of the Epicureans who rebel against the local Judge of Years, and seek to change the cliometric plan to allow us to exhaust our wealth rapidly in dissipation.”

Montrose wondered blankly if this was the identity of the mastodon cavalry he and Del Azarchel earlier glimpsed. Montrose said crossly, “But you are pretty sure we humans drove the Hyades off?”

She nodded. “Does that anger you?”

“There should be poxing celebrations and fireworks! Who wins a war and doesn’t tell their own common folk? You’re keeping the little people in the dark.”

Zoraida said serenely, “We of the Second Comprehension do not tell the underlings needless information. If we were victorious, it would make them proud. If the losses victory cost has doomed us to extinction, it would make them despair. Their nervous systems cannot stand the strain: it causes them to retreat into various psychological deliriums and defense mechanisms. It renders them unproductive.”

Montrose said to Del Azarchel, “So which is it? Are we victors? Or are we all slaves? Are the Hyades going to return, or is this the last of them forever? The Nymph says one thing and the Witch says the other.”

Del Azarchel said, “How would the loyal hound know whether his master were bond or free, vassal or liege? He is beaten when bad just the same, and he obeys his master’s voice. How much less know the sheep the hound watches?”

Montrose said, “Listen, lady. We was invited to your nice, cold, messed-up poxilicious world here because your local cliometric mugwumps want us to stop mucking with your history, right? So you want me and Blackie to suck lip and make nicey-nice, right?”

She nodded pensively. “That is not precisely the way I’d phrase it—”

“No,” murmured Del Azarchel. “You would use real words.”

“Well, we ain’t burying the hatchet, him and me, unless we know what is what and wherefore is whereabouts, savvy? One person says the aliens were victorious and left, and another says the aliens were defeated and left. We want to know why they came. What the hell did they write on the moon? Someone must have spoken to them. Who?”