And these so-called primitive races were not primitive at all. Some had library systems covering part of their world, or several worlds, or had thinking engines filling the volume of moons and planets and gas giants: They were Archangels, Potentates, and Powers.

Some were in advance of Sol, with megascale engineering structures orbiting their home stars in rings and ovals and woven strands of material, hemispheres or globes surrounding their suns, some or all of the material in the clouds and planetary belts and cometary haloes redesigned, transformed, made into self-aware calculation substances. They were Virtues, Principalities, and Hosts.

If there were any conquered civilization or species below what Rania had dubbed the Angelic level, the level equal to what Del Azarchel had achieved by reducing the entire hydrosphere of Earth to a coherent thinking system, it was not shown on these charts. Kardashev Zero species were too insignificant to be included.

Whatever hope Montrose might have harbored for contacting these beings, his fellow servants, and fomenting a general rebellion was dashed when he saw how much more advanced they were than Tellus, how much more bound to the Hyades systems of law and trade.

And these were only the projects under the rule of the star Ain. What mighty works preoccupied the four hundred remaining conquering stars in the Hyades Cluster were not imparted in the Cahetel maps and diagrams.

4. The Minions of Praesepe

The view widened again. Now the screens showed farther stars and greater beings. Here were the other Dominations, the equals of Hyades, and the fellow servants of something far superior to them, a Dominion seated in M44, the Praesepe Cluster. Montrose saw where the centers of power of the Dominations bound in fealty to Praesepe were.

Closest to Hyades was a small Domination whose capital was in the Melotte 111 star cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices, some 270 lightyears distant from Sol, occupying fifty stars.

This cluster of interlocking civilizations had made the choice of Achilles, to live splendid and short lives: the cliometric calculus showed rapid expansion followed by a sudden drop off and senescence. Circa A.D. 3,500,000 the various creatures and components of Melotte 111 Domination would destroy themselves in a series of psychological socioeconomic contractions. These extinctions would leave behind a rich detritus of elements, of artifacts, of libraries. A group of interstellar civilizations, now in the planning stage, destined to combine into a Domination in that same vicinity circa A.D. 5,500,000 would discover this detritus, and be catapulted precociously into the higher levels of mental topography, and become a Dominion. This Dominion would prove so useful against the wars and deprivations anticipated to arise throughout the Orion Arm in that era, that Praesepe did nothing to interfere with the suicidal shortsightedness of Melotte 111.

Next in size and power was a supercivilization spread throughout the famous Pleiades Cluster at 440 lights, a cluster dominated by hot, blue, and extremely luminous stars which (so the cliometric information revealed) had been fed interstellar rivers of gas to increase their burning and shorten their lives. For what purpose, the notation did not say.

Montrose saw the expansion plans of Ptolemy’s Cluster at eight hundred lights away, one of the closer servants races. The servant of Praesepe farthest from Earth was seated in the Cone Nebula, over two thousand lightyears away.

Xi Persei in the California Nebula, fifteen hundred lights from Sol, was the center of an immense globe of expansion, far outstripping the modest effort of Hyades. The smallest globe of expansion was in M42, also called the Orion Nebula, at sixteen hundred lights centered at Trapezium Cluster, where the civilization was busily making new stars. The cliometric mathematics displayed on side screens associated with these stars showed that Orion Nebula was destined to outstrip and overtake his master, the Dominion at Praesepe. This would take place in roughly a billion years.

And these maps did not reach beyond two thousand lightyears. Everything here was within one small segment of the Orion Arm. A few points in the Sagittarius or Perseus Arms were depicted, such as Ximen del Azarchel’s destination and flight path—yes, the motion of a vessel that large and that fast was observable to any large-scale orbital telescope. But few or no shipping lanes crossed between arms of the galaxy, and no downward chains of command. Where a shipping lane did cross the void between arms, one or more artificial columns or streamers of dust and nebular material had been constructed like a bridge. It was the opposite of what he would have expected. Emptier space was less economical for the starfaring civilizations to cross. That implied some sort of hydrogen ramscoop ship technology at work.

He corrected himself. He could not conclude that all starfaring civilizations were so limited. M3, for example, an Authority occupying a cloud of five hundred thousand stars, was orders of magnitude more powerful than these little polities of fifty or five hundred stars. Their chains of command reached across galactic distances all the way to Sol. The Authority technology could be as far beyond the Hyades as the Hyades was beyond Jupiter.

The largest scale star charts displayed the relative position of the arms of the Milky Way and the subgalaxies orbiting the core, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy would almost complete one orbit of the Milky Way in that period of time before the gravitic and tidal forces disrupted its structure, and brought its stars slowly into indistinguishable union with the other Milky Way stars.

Montrose, looking at the time values for those predictions, had the disorienting sensation of being a mayfly looking at a mountain. Surely, the mountain would wear down in time, but when measured in terms of the number of mayfly lives added end-to-end, it became horrendous.

Then he wondered if any currents, whenever they crossed his path, felt Montrose was such a mountain.

“Ridiculous!” he said to himself. “I am just like any other man.” And he put the thought into a side pocket of his perfect memory to have a subpersonality examine later in more depth. For the moment, he wanted to concentrate on the alien.

Why was it showing him this material?

“Do you have a name?” he asked aloud.

The black-coated, dripping skull seemed to be looking at him. The voice of the serpentine came from several of the nearby screens at once: Answered previously. We are the Cahetel of Hyades.

“That is the name we call you. Have you no name for yourself?”

Have you no name for yourself.

For a moment, he wondered why the creature was repeating him. The voice was without inflection, since the creature had not mastered the nuances of using spacing, tone, and pitch for information, so he did not realize it had asked him a question.

He said, “Menelaus Montrose.”

That is the name your mother called you. Have you no name for yourself?

It learned quickly. That sentence ended on a high note, indicating a question.

“I did not pick my own name when I was christened.”

Nor did we.

And in this sentence there was a clear hint of dry humor in the tone of voice. It learned quickly indeed.

He did not know which was worse, that this creature had actually made an indirect point in a fashion he understood, or that the creature had access to his dead self’s memories, and could read some or all of them.

Perhaps anticipating his thoughts, the entity spoke again.

Names issue from the verbal centers of ideation, occupying a mono-topological plane of the mental procedural ecology. Your Potentate had begun to experiment with multiple mental topographies, but intellects beneath the Virtue level are restricted to a single dimension of thought-to-symbol rationality. The Virtue Cahetel is polydimensional, ergo mental topological transformations no longer concern us. We employ preverbal structures for symbolization between signifiers and signified, and one-to-one unambiguities between signified logic relations.