Montrose reflected that, by the standards of the world when he was a child, he himself, in this current body with his brain made of logic diamond, was an artificial being, at least a cyborg; and the death of his giant central self, and the sudden jar of senile stupidity, was exactly the kind of lowering of intellectual resources he had just been imagining. So it was either death camps or it was planetwide senility, a voluntary act of self-lobotomy. He was not sure which was worse.

He looked more closely at the information.

Hyades was lagging far behind Xi Persei in the number and rate of planets colonized. But the measure was not merely the amount of new planetary oceans to be filled with organisms from mother worlds. It was a matter of stellar-scale engineering.

Hyades, albeit behind in colonization, was devoting more effort to building ringworlds and metallic clouds and Dyson spheres and hemispheres and other macroscale structures Montrose could put no name to, engineering projects that looked like balls of string loosely wound around stars.

“You want to turn all the inanimate matter in this arm of the galaxy into thinking machinery. Why?”

To think.

Montrose wondered if he imagined the hint of sarcasm in the creature’s voice.

“Why compel us, all these lesser civilizations, to aid you?”

To save time.

6. Shroeder’s Law

Montrose wished he had time to think.

What could he say to this creature that would lead to some good outcome, any kind of outcome, that was good for the human race?

Big Montrose must have seen it. The creature was pawing through the dead brain of Big Montrose like a ghoul pawing through a desecrated grave. It must know the answer it wanted Montrose to utter. It wanted him to speak a correct plea.

Frustrated, Montrose also did not want to let this opportunity slip. He was being shown, like a prisoner glimpsing the sunlit and wider world outside his cell through a crack in the door, just an adumbration of what the great galactic network of meta-civilizations controlling this arm of the galaxy was like. It was everything he had traveled to the Monument to discover, it was the reason he had stabbed himself so foolishly in the brainpan so long ago with an experimental intelligence augmentation chemical.

Hell, this was older than that. The brightly colored dreams of his childhood comics were all about this.

This was the future he had never been allowed to see.

He could not shake the fear that it was all about to slip through his fingers and be lost, like wine spilled in the desert.

“You still have not answered me. Why?”

The Principality of Ain serves the Domination of Hyades because we are compelled. The Domination of Hyades serves the Dominion of Praesepe because they are compelled. All other behavior options are forestalled as nonviable, inefficient, incorrect.

“Incorrect for what?”

Sophotransmogrification.

“Why not use your own people?”

Your people are expendable. They can be spent in sub-marginal colonization. Our people are expended in concentrations in nebulae and in stellar clouds of greater density.

That distracted him. Just out of pure curiosity, then, he said, “Why are your civilizations centered around nebulae?”

Clarification: Nebulae are centered around our civilizations. They are favored locations, since density of interstellar medium is thicker, hence travel expense by ramscoop ships is less. Also, in stellar nurseries, young and energetic stars are at hand for large-scale engineering projects.

The screens opened up with a second group of images. To his surprise, among the many stars and wonders he did not recognize, the images included many of the areas of space Blackie had been investigating so carefully so many years ago: the giant planets circling Hipparchos 13044 and HD 42176 in the constellation Auriga; a pulsar in Cygnus; on a larger scale were shown the expansion motions of the Local Interstellar Cloud; the star-making activity of the Great Nebula in Carina; and on yet a larger scale was shown the Mice Galaxies and Mayall’s Object and the triple collision of galaxies at ESO 593-IG 008; and the motion of Andromeda toward the Milky Way.

“Hold up. All these things are artificial? The universe is not the way it would naturally be—because it is all being cultivated, colonized, and reengineered!”

The alien abomination seemed to evince a human emotion: puzzlement, disappointment, exasperation. The giant star Mira is passing through this area at 291,000 miles per hour, a velocity sufficient to create a trail of debris and ejected streamers thirteen lightyears long. It is less than 300 lightyears from you. Surely you did not think this a natural phenomenon?

“Um.”

He wished that the history-making diplomatic dialog with a malign alien superintelligence did not contain him making a dull noise in his throat, but the serpentine must have translated it as a request for clarification, because the entity spoke again.

The Host of Mira accelerated their star out of its orbit around the galactic core in a vain attempt to flee the Forerunners who in ancient times were Archon of the Orion Arm. The dead Solar System was allowed to career onward as a warning to others. Natural phenomena are regular and repeatable, whereas no other star exhibits such extreme behavior. How could your race fail to notice this?

“All our resources were preoccupied with SETI research, I reckon.”

The serpentine must have sent a very diplomatic version of that comment, or else the entity was in a talkative mood, because it answered: A simple calculation shows that the rate at which nova and supernova stars ignite, and their distribution, is artificial. The ignitions take place away from delicate operational centers, but periodically are used to seed heavier elements into the galactic background, to allow for the rise of new life. Galaxies who fail to do so perish due to a lack of new civilizations to replace dead cells in their mental system, or else migrate to richer areas.

Another calculation shows the impossibility of so many spiral galaxies and galactic collisions, or the creation of walls and voids amid the superclusters.

The spiral motion is imparted to elliptical and irregular galaxies in order to force interstellar organizations to form coherent bonds with distant stars more homogeneously.

Montrose said, “And to think, all this time people wondered why there were no signs of alien life among the stars. There were plenty of signs. They were just too big to see.” He had read somewhere, perhaps in a comic, some half-serious maxim called Shroeder’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Man on Earth had been sitting in the middle of the industrial activity of extraterrestrial civilizations for its entire life, everything from pulsars to nova stars to the shape of the galaxy itself, and thought it was all natural.

He wondered if some tiny mites born in a cathedral would develop cunning theories about the evolution of the pillars and the stained-glass windows, or look at the curve of the Gothic arch, and be awed by Mother Nature’s mathematic perfection. “Well, Mother Nature has a hairdresser, don’t she?”

And it meant the Monument notation was not mad at all. This was not a universe where one could divide by zero. The math was sane.

He and Blackie had just made a simple but erroneous assumption. Knowing that Hyades could build an antimatter star was not something that naturally allows a man to make the leap of assuming that a mind composed of tens of millions of self-aware solar systems in the Andromeda Galaxy had deliberately set their galaxy on a collision path across the millions of lightyears to ram the Milky Way.