That was more like it. That sounded like an alien. Poxing incomprehensible.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Since the serpentine was using the same voice pattern as the alien, Montrose for a moment thought the alien was answering: “He is requesting a clarifying simplification.” But no, the serpentine was explaining Montrose’s comment to the entity.

The Cahetel entity spoke. Again, its voice betrayed more nuance. It almost sounded alive. Not quite.

Simplification: Our system uses different and unique names for different and unique object-events in the extensions of spacetime matter-energy, and symbolizes similarities of category by nominal similarities. Since we are not the same Cahetel now as when the moment ago we began to speak, we have no consistent name to offer.

“You seem the same to me.”

That is a limitation of your perception. If you insist on aberrant symbolism, call me Menelaus Montrose. His memory information now serves Hyades.

He is, as we are, of Cahetel. He is, as we, of Ain. He is, as we, of Hyades.

Menelaus Montrose will not endure. The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

5. The Fellow Servants

That comment made a tremor run through him. Montrose was surprised at himself. Was talking to this abomination actually so much worse than staring down the bore of an enemy pistol? Apparently it was. When he wiped his palms on his trousers, he realized they were slick with sweat.

“Let’s stick with calling you Cahetel. Why are you showing me these star charts, these maps of time?”

That you may enter a correct plea. You now speak for the human race, including biological and formal systems, Angels, Archangels, and Potentates, up through your Power housed in your innermost planet.

“Innermost? Jupiter is the fifth planet, not the first.”

The smaller, rocky bodies of the inner system are no longer significant. Do you have sufficient to plead with us? What you say determines the outcome for your race and its generations.

“Sufficient what? Sufficient information, you mean?”

Montrose now realized why he was so frightened. One wrong phrase, one wrong word, and he lost everything.

He would lose his life and his world and their future.

He would lose Rania.

Montrose dearly wished his bigger, smarter self, the titanic body holding the calculation power of the Selene mind occupying the core of the moon, were here to advise him. His dim and flattened memories of what his larger self had meant to do, what he had understood about the universe, were like a dream that evaporates on waking. He wondered if men in the old days who suffered grievous head injuries, and forgot how to read and write, or senile grandfathers reduced to the thinking level of small children knew what this was like.

“No one appointed me to speak for the human race.”

You form a strange attractor within the cliometric system, therefore we elect you.

He had no response for that.

The creature spoke again, this time in a demanding tone of voice: Do you know sufficient facts of the general situation in which your race finds itself to determine how best to serve the Hyades?

“Why the hell should we serve the Hyades?” It burst out of him before he knew what he said.

The tendrils reaching down from the eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth of the creature now waved and writhed like the arms of a squid, standing out in each direction. It looked like a hand reaching through the mouth of a mask suddenly opening its fingers.

But it was not a threatening gesture. The ropes and twigs of murk material dripping from the face of the black skull were pointing; a first group at the screens, a second group at the dome, or at the deck. Montrose knew from his internal star atlases that each in this second group of tendrils were pointing at one or another of the areas of space the screens represented: Coma Berenices, Pleiades, Ptolemy’s Cluster, the Cone Nebula, Xi Persei, and Orion Nebula.

Then he noticed each tendril in the second group was twisted or flexed in such a way to make it complementary to an oppositely twisted tendril in the first. They were paired up: one tendril pointed at the screen showing M34, and its mate was pointed downward at the position where (had the bulk of Sedna not been in the way) the constellation Perseus turned.

He opened his mouth to ask the creature why it made itself so damn hard to understand? Cahetel obviously could make itself more human at will, able to talk more clearly. Why all this dropping hints?

Montrose snapped his mouth shut without speaking. He was not as smart as Big Montrose, but he still enjoyed a many-leveled mind of posthuman efficiency, rapid as lightning and clear as crystal. He did not need to ask what the many parallel thought-structures in his mind could see for him using their method of rapid sequential intuition.

The resources absorbed by dialog with any man would be charged against Man’s racial indenture. Brevity was more efficient.

It was the same reason why Cahetel had come toward Sol taking leisurely millennia rather than a century and a half. Cahetel was saving Sol money.

“We’ve been enslaved by the cosmic misers!” Montrose thought savagely to himself. “They are charging us by the syphilitic word!”

And they might be charging by the second. That was not a comforting thought.

He looked carefully again at the screens and related cliometric information. It was a detailed map of the Orion Arm out to two light-millennia, and a map of future history out to A.D. One Million, the end of the current Epoch.

“You cannot spare any resources, can you? Why? Why are you so poxing poor?”

With a stab of clarity akin to terror, he remembered how hard and cruel his mother and his older relatives all had made themselves to be, during the Starvation Years, back when he was young. Poor folk could be generous with each other, but not with strangers, or livestock.

He remembered the savage efficiency his mother used wringing a neck of a chicken, nasty, smelly birds whom she tried so desperately to keep alive long enough to sell. If the chickens could talk, any dialog between Ma and some bedraggled, proud cock with a plan for saving more chicks would no doubt have been much like this talk with Cahetel.

“Why are you poor? What is happening?”

We detect an error in the memories of Menelaus Montrose. The other Dominations in service to Praesepe are not allies to Hyades. We are not displaying the locations and extrapolations of fellow servants pursuing a mutual long-term gain.

“They are your enemies.”

The elements of our purpose proving inefficient must and shall be obliterated.

Montrose wondered if it spent fewer resources to repeat a statement than to formulate a new one. Then he realized this was not a threat from Cahetel toward Sol. Cahetel was speaking of a threat to Hyades, its master.

“Hold up. What the hell? You mean—you are in a contest to colonize planets. I get that. Whoever spreads the most races to the most worlds wins. The losers get—what happens to them? I don’t get that. Praesepe kills them?”

Silence. Apparently the miserliness of the creature with its words extended even to an unwillingness to confirm the obvious.

Montrose looked again at the cliometric information. The Domination at the Pleiades, according to the figures and diagrams, had been downgraded, and was in the process of being dismantled. Liquidated. He could not tell from the code notations whether this meant screaming and weeping millions of some sort of big-headed fish people were being fed into abattoirs, or if it meant gigantic machines in orbit being reduced in energy intake and lowering their intelligence by an order of magnitude.