The serpentine said, “Sir? Do you want me to send your last comment?”

7. Not Uncivilized

Montrose shook himself out of his reverie. “Negative. Ask him this: some of the material in the nebulae is the byproduct of industrial activity. What is the rest?”

Other material is the residuum of ancient military actions.

“War?” Montrose remembered wondering why so many of the galaxies looked torn and scarred. He felt the fool for not realizing that they were.

He imagined a precocious mite living in a cathedral that was being bombed. The whole life of the mite was part of a single second, and to him the picture was frozen. The shattered glass in the window as it fell would be a natural phenomenon, the shrapnel holes in the pews, and the flames burning the roof. He would have no other cathedrals to compare it to, and would simply keep changing his theories until they fit what he saw. When he concluded all roofs naturally burst into flame after a certain point in their roofly evolution, perhaps he would climb the steeple and look outside, and see the other buildings in the neighborhood, see their roofs all blazing.

The precocious mite would congratulate himself on his theory, and sit in awe, staring at the natural wonders of the universe, just as Montrose had stared at the exploding stars and smoldering nebulae and colliding galaxies.

Surely your astronomers have noticed the war damage near your star: the Crab Pulsar is the remnant whose shock wave reached Sol in A.D. 1054. It is only 6500 lightyears from you.

“We thought it was a supernova.”

So it was.

“We thought it was a natural phenomenon.”

That is a limitation of your perception.

Montrose had no rejoinder to that.

We know your race is aware of the antimatter stars. Surely you did not think them natural? They are placed in areas where starfaring races are likely to be encountered.

“Near curious sights, in other words. But what if a race is not that curious?”

Races without a requisite degree of curiosity cannot develop the scientific and technical skills needed for starfaring. When such a race is encountered, they are obliterated to make room for more useful races. Your race unwisely broadcasts electromagnetic signals from your home planet during your pre-starflight era. It is fortunate that you encountered us before we encountered you.

Montrose felt a moment of stomach-wrenching disorientation. Captain Grimaldi commanding the first expedition to the Diamond Star had ordered the expedition never to return home, so that they would not lead the Hyades back to Sol. It was to defy that order that Del Azarchel, then the ship’s pilot and senior officer of the landing party, had committed murder and mutiny. But if Grimaldi’s order had been carried out, and if by some other means Hyades had become aware of Earth’s existence, mankind would have been exterminated. In this strange universe, a lack of curiosity was a capital crime. Did that mean Blackie was right?

His mind reeled back from that thought. No. Murder was still murder, and you did not judge a man’s guilt or innocence by might-have-beens.

Then he saw something else in the images Cahetel was showing. Other areas of the sky overlapped where Blackie had spent so much time stargazing. The antimatter star in the Omega Nebula was noted there.

Bingo. That was what Blackie had been looking for. He perhaps had also been doing a mathematical analysis of star distributions and evolutionary patterns, but if so, it was not for idle curiosity but to find evidence of the engineering effort needed to make a stellar mass of antimatter. He had been seeking an energy supply to feed an interstellar civilization he meant to found and rule.

As for living in a universe where one can divide by zero, and math was just an illusion produced by the senses? No mathematician could think such nonsense. Blackie said that to throw him off the scent, so Montrose would not realize what Blackie was looking for.

In Cahetel’s images and diagrams, there was a third thing he saw, or, rather, did not see. “Your diagrams here do not show any active fighting.”

Indeed not. The Forerunners were long ago. War is mutually inefficient. We are not uncivilized creatures.

“Then it’s a Cold War?” he said.

If you refer to war by proxy, by espionage and indirect means, then that is not the correct term for our effort. We are not uncivilized creatures.

“What the hell is it, then?”

An organized effort of mutual destruction where both parties seek to minimize the negative external inefficiencies by strict adherence to a mutually agreed set of strictures.

It is a duel.

“Damn me. I guess you are civilized after all.”

8. The Forerunners of Orion

“One last question, Cahetel, and I will be ready to plea my pleading. Why is there a duel? Praesepe Cluster evidently ordered you to fill the Orion Arm with life-forms, or machine life-forms, or something. Sophont matter. Anything that thinks. And Hyades is in a duel to the death with the other slave races of Praesepe to carry out the orders. Whoever comes in last, or works least effectively, gets liquidated. I get that. But why? Why the rush? What the hell is going on?”

Hell is going on.

“Huhn? I mean, please amplify.”

Is “Hell” not the correct term for the place of endless pain for past misdeeds inflicted when all hope of correction, vendetta, or retribution is past?

“You—or Hyades—is being punished?”

Not as such. This general area of the Orion Arm is being punished.

“Why?”

The Orion Arm once enjoyed a properly growing ratio of sophont material to support material. There was a Forerunner race—call them the Panspermians—who favored the use of small, rocky planets like your Earth for the spread of life. To this end, the Panspermians distributed favorable raw materials and chemical combinations throughout the Orion Arm. The cultivation was successful, and the Panspermians flourished, becoming the Authority and then the Archon of this Arm of the Galaxy, coequal with other great powers of which Hyades knows little.

Then the Panspermian civilization vanished circa 444,000,000 B.C. We who dwell here must undo the bad effects of those events.

That was the Silurian Period on Earth. It was about when the latest and greatest form of life on the surface of the planet was moss. In the ocean the biggest invention thrilling the sea life was coral. And some ambitious fish had developed the jawbone.

“Vanished how?”

The specifics are not known. Civilizations of this magnitude vanish only when conquered, and they are conquered only when internal conflict and self-destructive comportments weaken them.

“So they were conquered? By who?”

Unknown. Hyades reports only that the conqueror favored the cultivation of gas giants, jovians and superjovians, as being more likely candidates, richer in matter, to use as a base resource for creating living planets, over the small and rocky worlds preferred by the Panspermians.

“So the Big Planet guys beat up the Little Planet guys,” muttered Montrose. It explained the preponderance of life-forms evolved on Jovian worlds he had just seen in these records. But it did not explain the source of the conflict. For some reason, he was reminded of the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in the old satire by Swift, fought between those who cracked their breakfast eggs on the big end versus the small end.

“Do your masters know what the war was about?”

We suspect they know.