“Impossible,” said Montrose. “Men are men, even when they aren’t! There must be some resistance even now, plans to fight back!”

Selene did not answer in words. A new set of music themes rolled forth, as different in mood and expression and symbol as the symphonies they had heard heretofore as impromptu jazz differed from a dirge. It took a moment for Montrose to examine the multidimensional mathematical model in his head that the language of music had just opened up to him.

This was related to the Monument universal semantics, but it was not the same. Translated back into the lines and sine waves, this was the music of the message written across the face of the moon. Not the First Contact message of the Monument. Asmodel’s message. The only cenotaph for all the souls slain by Asmodel.

Yes, he could see very clearly the parameters along which the Asmodel entity worked.

It had neither retreated in fear nor stayed in pride to conquer.

Both Montrose and Del Azarchel had vastly overestimated the human race’s importance in the scheme of things. The reason for the very slow approach of the Virtue Asmodel across the millennia had been because mankind was not worth the fuel-price of a swift approach. It had also been to allow mankind the time needed, under the pressure of immanent invasion, to establish institutions, sciences, technologies, and self-aware world-library systems.

It had been to allow Earth to go from a Kardashev Zero to a Kardashev One level of civilization: to be a polity that controlled and used all the energies and resources of their tiny speck of globe. At the very last minute, thanks to the total cooperation of all aspects of the bicameral society of Earth, both Noöspherical and Phantasmal, that Kardashev One level, the minimum level, was reached.

But Asmodel had no reason to linger and rule the Earth. The earthlings were not sophisticated enough to domesticate. It merely scooped up raw material, including thinking materials such as people, from the planet’s surface and parts of the logic diamond from the planet core, as well as enough of the ecosphere to sustain them only for the voyage, and shipped them off by lightsail to distant and worthless worlds.

They saw the conditions of the stars, one after another after another, like a roll call of names, famed in song and prose, of the nearby yellow stars, near twins of Sol, his sisters: Promixa, 36 Ophiuchus, Omicron Eridani, 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchus, 82 Eridani, Altair, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Eta Cassiopeiae, Gliese 570 in Libra, HR 7703 in Sagittarius, Tau Ceti. The music unfolded mathematical notations that formed images in their brains.

All were very nearly Earth-like, near enough to make their morbific flaws all the most hideous.

It was a roster of unfit planets, a freak show: a torch world, too close to his sun for human life; or a tide-locked world with no rotation, half fiery Hell and half Niflheim; or a cold world orbiting a dull star; or a world tormented by open plains of lava; or a globe choked with an atmosphere of deadly gas; or one flooded with seas of venom; or a subterrestrial too light to hold an atmospheric thick enough to block deadly radiation; or a superterrestrial of bone-breaking gravity; or a globe tumbling pole over pole through an orbit eccentric enough to boil the seas in summer and freeze the atmosphere in winter; or one cloaked in magnetic fields too intense for human nervous systems to remain sane; or a world entangled with an asteroid belt, doomed to endless extinction-level collisions.

Worthless. Unfit for human habitation.

A new movement started, a cliometric analysis of the futures of such worlds, like a fan of possibilities, a glimpse of hope, a gleam.…

Again, the music cut off abruptly.

Montrose said slowly, as if each word were pain, “The final expression Phi substructure in the Concubine Vector shows a negative sum for any long-term relation. It says only marginal worlds, ones not worth their colonists, are where our people are being sent. They are being sent to die.”

Selene said, “With the immensely powerful magnifications the twin orbital mirrors permit, we have studied the target stars of the First Sweep and verified the Cenotaph reports: these worlds cannot support human life as it is currently constituted, neither surface-based nor Melusine, nor Man nor Swan nor Ghost. Hence, all the deracinated are fated to die.”

“I do not understand,” said Del Azarchel. But his tone of voice made it clear this was something he wished were true, not something that was.

Montrose said, “The First Sweep stars are those to which our populations have been hauled by force. The slave colonies. Proxima Centauri and Delta Pavonis.…”

“I know that, you fool!” said Del Azarchel. “I do not understand the purpose!”

“Be at peace,” said Selene, with strange, unnatural calm. “We have already established the ceremony of mourning for the myriad populations doomed to perish, albeit, clearly, the genocides will not take place for decades or centuries.”

Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps some sort of provision aboard the ship will act as an intermediary.…”

Selene said, “Deceive yourself with no false hope. The Hyades slave ships will lower the earth life to the surface, desert or deep ocean or mountain or volcano, and expel them without further ado. Whether they live or die is no concern. The Cenotaph is utterly unambiguous on that point.”

Montrose said softly, “Some means must exist—if the shipboard Hyades controls permitted the people to convert whatever life-support equipment aboard the slave ships”—an uneven note troubled Montrose’s voice—“habitats could be burrowed out of the crust using the skyhook as a pile driver—a few habitats—for a few years—could—could be by some long shot, could find a way to survive.…”

Montrose in his posthuman imagination was able to picture and feel what the death of millions of people would be like, each and every death, lingering or sudden. The vision of it was like a cold hand, choking him. He wished for the days when he was stupider, and could ignore things, or see them only dimly.

His posthuman intellect could also deduce that such jury-rigged habitats, even assuming an unrealistically high mass of the slave ship converted to useful life support, could not expand, hence could not long sustain a population.

“The long shot is long indeed, Dr. Montrose,” said Selene, “for the Hyades will provide no way. We have no means for seeding crops beforehand, nor altering the gas balances in unbreathable atmospheres. The cruelty is unimaginable: millions dropped at random even in this fashion on Earth would simply be decimated.”

Del Azarchel said, “No advanced species can be so wasteful!”

Selene said softly, “The waste, Senior Del Azarchel, is small indeed to beings affluent beyond measure. There are two hundred sixty thousand stars within two hundred fifty lightyears of Sol, none of which are utterly barren. With so many worlds, even if less than one percent were useful to them, scores of thousands remain from which many hundreds can be selected for slave colonies. Alas that natural man is adapted to the environment of the Earth’s surface too perfectly to prosper elsewhere, or even to survive.”

Montrose said, “But why? Launching Asmodel required more energy than our race has ever produced in all our years put together. Why go to such expense just to exterminate so many innocent people? Why not just gas them or blast them or space them or drop them into a sun?”

Selene said, “As you deduced, the behavior is ceremonial. By interfering with the Diamond Star, just as the Monument warned you not to, you triggered a reaction; a reaction which the Cold Equations of their inhuman law requires them to carry out, lest their inhuman neighbors among the constellations perceive the omission. If we were advanced sufficiently to be a race for whom the Monument was written, being expelled naked onto the surface of a hostile world would be no discomfort. Such is our punishment for presuming ourselves to have been so high. Such are the wages of overweening pride.”