“You really are civilized, ain’t you? More than I am. Damnation and perdition! I never knew being civilized was so damn creepy.”

9. The Strange Light of Far Suns

It was clear enough, now, what the entity wanted. The Cold Equations that governed the interstellar polity of the Hyades demanded efficiency at all levels. The wastefulness of things like free will and biological life were to be minimized.

But within the pinching limits of those invisible mathematical chains of prediction, efficiency, retribution, and cost, there was room to maneuver. The particular game-theory equation, in this particular circumstance, was simple enough that even Montrose could follow it: Cahetel and Sol were in a position where mutual cooperation was possible. It would actually save Cahetel a small amount of resources if mankind volunteered for the sake of the grand project in which Hyades was engaged. The project of Sophotransmogrification covered thousands and millions of years, and reached through thousands of cubic lightyears of space, and involved unguessed expanses of nebula and suns and worlds.

And for Hyades, and, presumably, for Cahetel, it was not a matter of life and death. No, death was something individual organisms did. This was a matter of triumph or genocide. Whole races, whole star systems, whole civilizations, the unimaginable richness of mental processes throbbing at the core of machines larger than gas giants, all would be degraded and destroyed if the project failed.

(Was there a word for death on a scale larger than genocide? Larger than planetary extinctions? On an astronomical scale?)

So Cahetel was not going to go away and leave mankind alone. The two score or so worlds within a volume of thirty-three lightyears the Equations assigned for Sol at this point in time to colonize were not to be left to go to waste.

He had an aching hunger for more answers. But Montrose, as if by an intuition, knew he would get no more out of the emissary of Cahetel standing before him. The black strands of material elongating from the faceless skull were now seeking out connections with information nodes, control switches, junction boxes, and the like. This nameless creature was mutating from being a negotiator to being a captain. Sedna was preparing for an interstellar journey.

Montrose tapped the serpentine. “Can you connect me to the loudspeakers? I want to talk to everyone left alive and sane aboard this world.”

Two of the screens near him showed him a roster of the personnel. The psychological contour showed such a similarity of mind and memory-chain that Montrose saw no need to interview them each individually.

His voice rang from deck to deck though all corridors honeycombing the little world of rock and ice. “Gentlemen, we are defeated. It has been an honor serving with you. My command had led you to disgrace and loss. If it is any comfort to those who grieve, the Archangel-level version of me is dead, and his memory chains have been vampirized by the enemy.

“At this time I am negotiating surrender terms. Cahetel will take control of the Black Fleet, and use the fifty worldlets to deracinate the Earth, and the colonies of experimental humans on Venus, and the penal colony of the Space Chimera on Mars. Then the worldlets will spread sail and head out for those worlds we were long ago told it was our fate to torture into Earth-like shape, and to torment our children into adapting to. This includes exile to the twenty-six worlds of the Second Sweep, and it includes pilgrimage to the fifteen worlds of the twelve stars in the First Sweep, where we can bury the dead and continue the terraforming and pantropic enterprises your ancestors against their will began.

“However, the Cahetel entity would prefer volunteers to unwilling victims.

“The disasters of the First Sweep speak for themselves. I am prepared to offer the entity that if it will undertake to prevent Jupiter from extending control over these forty Stepmother Earths, volunteers willing to escape the tyranny of life under the Power of Jupiter can be found.

“Cahetel has sufficient mass to convert part of its substance to murk, creating a mind able to resist the cunning of Jupiter. It could sit in the sun like a Salamander in a campfire—we know that Hyades knows how to build structures able to withstand that environment—and be out of Jupiter’s reach. The Salamander could be given direct control of the Gravitic-Nucleonic distortion rings, and so would control both radio-laser communication and launching and deceleration energy for sailing ships hereafter.

“It is a simple deal. The First Sweep showed that we humans, biological humans, are more efficient when it comes to the dirty, low-tech business of breeding and dying on a frontier and taming a world. All we want in return is freedom. No more children taken away from mothers to go into the Venus pits of Jupiter’s servants. No more genocides of races and bloodlines deemed unfit. That is what the colonies will have. It will be hell, but it will be a hell of our making. It will be ours, and—more important—we will be ours. Each man will own himself.

“And, in return, the critter living in the sun, the Salamander, just won’t let Jupiter run things to suit himself. The Salamander will be told to take orders from humans living outside the Noösphere, because we are the only ones going to be living and dying on the new worlds.

“I don’t know what Cahetel will say. It may be more expensive to do what I am suggesting than whatever resources are saved by winning our willing cooperation. Maybe the Salamander would have to be special ordered from manufacturing back at Epsilon Tauri, in which case, we will not see this deal come through until roughly the Thirty-seventh Millennium, when the Hyades returns again for the Third Sweep.

“I do not know, gentlemen of the Myrmidon race, how much of your master and creator Del Azarchel lives in you. He would be willing to think along those time scales, and to plan out the generations by the hundreds and by the thousands. And your race is unlikely to flourish on these new worlds—the primitive conditions will make it impossible to repair, replace, or manufacture the Aurum substance of your thinking peripheries. The Swans may also prove maladaptive. But both the Second and the Third Humanities can help the first few generations of Firsts get a foothold, and, in time, there will be second expedition to each of these stars, and third, and long after that, regular trade, and enough of a foothold of civilization that the less robust and more complex forms of man could also spread out.

“You see, if your master Del Azarchel brings back even half the contraterrene I expect, Sol will be rich enough to be able to fund a fleet of star vessels, and will be able to spin up the starbeams.

“You can stay here, and go into suspension with me, and live to see the end of these great events. Or you can stay aboard, go out and create the future I am describing, and never see Earth again, and be buried under the strange lights of far suns.

“I am going to use that tinfoil bubble lifeboat the mutineers so thoughtfully provided. It will take me nearly a century to reach the inner system again. So I should be just in time to greet Blackie when he arrives.

“What will I tell him, gentlemen? What do I tell your father? Will I say another generation of slaves were carried off against their will to die on alien worlds? Or will I say his children leaped into the throat of Hell, and tamed those worlds, and made them ours?

“My command ended in death and failure. I am not qualified to make this decision. Effective immediately, I resign my commission as commander-in-chief and abdicate my position as your Nobilissimus.

“Now hear this: I have loaded the cliometric parameters of the future I just described, written out all nice and neat in Monument notation that Cahetel can read, and placed it in the public channels of Sedna, in those areas of the infosphere Cahetel has not corrupted with murk.