“Jupiter isn’t a corpse now, like Big Me is?”

“Indeed not, sir. Ximen del Azarchel anticipated an event like this before he departed on his expedition to the Second Monument in the Sagittarius Arm. He left strict orders that no murk technology was to be introduced to Jupiter for any reason at any time.”

“He anticipated—” And Montrose shouted out a series of swearwords.

“Sir, that is anatomically impossible, not to mention unsanitary.”

“Blackie set me up. Set up Big Me. All of me. Outsmarted me again! Damn him! No wonder I killed myself! Blackie knew the aliens did not just drop off bits of murk by accident. It was left behind on purpose, so we stupid little humans with our stupid little monkeylike curiosity would copy it, see how useful it was, and put it in our brains. And then they left behind these nice, shiny, huge starbeam projectors—gravitic-nucleonic distortion pools—because if any race on any conquered planet tries to fight back, of course they will try to hit the incoming boatload of slave masters with the biggest cannon they got. And this cannon is designed to act in perfect concert with the supersymmetry breaking particles. Damn them. Damn their droopy, limp, leprous male members to the most scabrous plague-bearing pits of unsanctified syphilitic per-poxing-dition!”

Another thought occurred to him. Quietly, he muttered to himself, “Blackie even said the murk was cognitive matter, the first time we ever laid eyes on it. And I was so busy making fun of him that I did not stop to think about it. Murk actually was the military governor, just like I joked. But the only order it ever gave was the order for us to surrender—without even bothering to give the order. Damn me. Damn him. Damn us both.”

Montrose looked up at the dome. He could see the Constellation Taurus back in its accustomed spot in the heavens, and the star called Ain glistering balefully.

He could not imagine exactly what had been done. How had Cahetel bent the beam path? A ripple in the fabric of space, created by the frame-dragging effect? A warp caused by the temporary singular-point sources? Something that reversed the flow of photons, and made spacetime itself, for a moment, in the arc of the bowshock, act like a perfect mirror? Perhaps nothing made of matter could withstand a starbeam, but a black hole, while made of matter, could bend and parry light in its steep-sided gravity well, without ever being touched by it. And a singularity could in theory be dense rather than massive, just so long as the escape velocity of the body—even a submicroscopic body—was greater than lightspeed.

The aliens parried a beam of light; bent the starbeam into a horseshoe and sent it back at its attacker. Montrose thought by rights such nonsense should be impossible, but it did not seem to break any laws of nature he knew.

Perhaps it was not impossible, but it was unfair that these Hyades creatures should be so advanced. And they were not even the most advanced of the Dominions, Dominations, or Authorities depicted on the Monument.

Even as he watched, the star Ain winked, and grew dim, returning to its ancient luster. With perfect timing, the home base back at Ain had cut the projection one hundred fifty-one years ago, anticipating to within the day when Cahetel would have taken command of the local murk technology, and control of the local starbeam.

The humans had copied the murk without understanding what they were copying. It worked, and they did not have the tools to take apart and analyze the artificial subatomic particles of which it was made. Not even Jupiter could devise any tools that operated on the picometric scale.

It seemed that the dead Montrose, once he had realized what murk was, and that it was a trap, could not download himself into any other housing, for fear that some hidden virus or contamination had already been implanted in him.

The living Montrose now stared at Epsilon Tauri, which the Swans called Ain, and knew he had lost again. But he would not allow the self-sacrifice of his larger, smarter self to be in vain. Big Montrose had died, knowing or guessing that Cahetel would read his dead brain, and see the thoughts and memories there.

And the foremost thought in Montrose’s mind, the image that kept pressing in on his imagination, was seeing all the stars in space bound and chained by little invisible threads that looked like swirls and curlicues and angles and lines and sine waves, all the logic and mathematics of the Monument Codes.

But the slavers were slaves also. Asmodel and Cahetel and Hyades were slaves, as was the Praesepe Cluster, which the Monument said was the superior of Hyades. And was M3, the great globular cluster in Canes Venatici outside the galaxy, a master with no master above it?

But M3 was bound by the invisible bonds of game theory, war theory, economics, resources, distance, and time, all the Cold Equations of the immensities of space just as all its lesser minions, servants, serfs, slaves, pets, and livestock were.

Montrose said, “Cahetel has asked me to plea. It said two-way communication was imperative. Imperative not because Cahetel asked to communicate with us—the fact that he did not answer our message capsules left in his flight path made that clear—but imperative because it was imperative we speak to him. And Cahetel can see it there in my dead brain. Well, fine, I know how to play this hand I’ve been dealt. I don’t have to like it, but I can.”

“And what message shall I send?”

“Tell Cahetel that the human race will cooperate with settling the Second Sweep worlds on one condition. Cahetel has to explain why.”

“Why what, sir?”

“Why all this? What the hell is the point? What do they want?”

“Are you asking what Cahetel wants, sir? That is obvious. It has already said. To compel living worlds to colonize dead worlds, and turn dead matter into cognitive matter.”

“I got that part. To make a galaxy where everything talks. But that is not what I am asking. I want to know what his masters want. Hyades. Praesepe. Canes Venatici. Everyone. I want the big picture. I want to know what is going on.”

“Do you think it will answer, sir?”

“Yes. Because for the first time, the human race is in position to aid the interstellar colonization project. I was fool enough to be fooled into spending—Jesus up a tree! Was it really nineteen hundred years?—a poxload of time building up this huge war fleet, the biggest flotilla ever aloft. And I remember that I encouraged the custom of dueling, of going armed, among all the races of Earth, Man and Swan and Myrmidon, until that custom became law. And there is something about a sense of honor and being willing to kill and die for it with a gun in your hand that makes a man ornery and ungovernable. It makes a man unready to be a slave and ready to be a pioneer. All the effort of mankind was put into the war effort. Like the time Texas planted the first flag on the moon, planted the first human footprint. But there was no war effort, no huge space program! It was just us making our own cattle boats to ship out to it.”

“I believe that was the United States of America, sir, not Texas acting alone.”

“Bullpox! All the records show the space command was in Houston!—Anyway, my point is that Blackie played me like a fiddle, and he ain’t even here. He knew the humans would be willing to get organized on a truly massive scale for a war, even if we would not be so organized for any peaceful purpose. That is the nature of mankind, and all the technical revolutions since the dawn of time ain’t changed that.

“So ask the damn critter why all this happened? It did not answer before—could not—because the Cold Equations tell it when the cost of sending messages is too high, you don’t answer. But now this damn wee little piece of Cahetel is standing in the room with me, and he knows we have a common interest, a quid pro quo. And I know that, unlike me, Cahetel is programmed, hypnotized, or honor bound—I ain’t sure which—to seek out the most efficient solution. It has to seek a cooperative solution in any situation where we have stepped outside the narrow limits of the Concubine Vector.