Over the immense ranges, distances, and time-intervals that governed interstellar power relations, nothing that made human life and civilization unique mattered. If it was not worth taking centuries of time to cross lightyears of space to get, as far as the cold equations were concerned, it did not exist.

The basic theme of the opening statement of the Alpha group was portrayed again in the Kappa group, distorted by a transformation sequence. By the grammar rules of the Monument, this returned the statement to the beginning again: reduced it to the life-death, either-or choice.

Earth obeyed or died. The volume of the obedience latitude was controlled by the cold equations of interstellar power.

“The Diamond Star is just a baited hook?” Menelaus tried to imagine what kind of race had such resources at its command that it could create such an immense, and immensely useful, source of energy, and merely leave it planted in space scores of lightyears from home.

“A ‘watering hole’ is what you called it,” said Melchor de Ulloa. His features were handsome and youthful once more. “The predators dug a watering hole, knowing the prey would come out of the jungle to drink.”

“It’s ridiculous!” said Montrose, his voice a blend of fear and outrage. “That’s just bull … gotta be … a race that advanced … peaceful trade would make more sense, cost less?… No bloodshed … they have the basic equations of game theory written out right here! Everyone wins, a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum … it can’t be … must have read it wrong! There is a lot more to the Monument than just those symbol groups! The whole Southern Hemisphere of the Monument, we don’t have a single line translated! And what kind of damn useless warning sign is that? Danger! By the time you read this, it is too late. But if they can make a star out of antimatter—and don’t tell me a contraterrene-matter star in a terrene-matter galaxy is not artificial! That’s a feat of engineering God himself could not do!—If they can do that, why would they bother with us? With such wealth and such power—”

Melchor de Ulloa shook his head, smirking. “Never trust the rich.”

Montrose saw in the corner of his eye, on one of the overhead screens, the branches of the conversation tree dividing and changing color. But the Hermeticists had their hands folded, left over right, their fingers not touching on the control surfaces of their red amulets. Who was prioritizing the conversation?

Del Azarchel said softly, “Even with such wealth and power, they are limited by the strictures of economics, of game theory, of time, space, and distance.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said heavily, “Why this message? Why bother with such a warning? Why go to the immense, the unthinkable expense?”

Del Azarchel said, “I know a little bit about game theory myself. The easiest way to win in a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ type situation is to have a retaliation strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent over time: in this case, very long times indeed, measured in millennia. It has often been speculated that any star-faring intelligences would have to be either very long-lived beings, or possess very long-lived social structures.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “We have the age estimates for when the Monument was built. Millions of years ago. Who would bother putting up a warning sign so old? And who could believe the Monument Builders are still around to act out their threat? If they are as old as the dinosaurs, they are most likely as extinct as the dinosaurs.”

Reyes y Pastor said, “What slew the dinosaurs? An asteroid? An ice age? Suppose the Monument Builders could swat aside an extinction-level asteroid as easily as a mother brushing a fly from her sleeping child, or adjust the climates of worlds as if with a thermostat—assuming they chose to tarry on a world at all. Once a posthuman civilization gains control of all of nature, no natural disaster can destroy it. And if their wisdom grows with their power, no artificial disaster either.”

Del Azarchel said, “This span of years seem large to us. Does it seem large to them? What if the races of the Hyades are ten or a hundred times that age? In the long, slow process of cosmic evolution, only the most conservative of races, intelligences whose ways are set in adamant, could arrive at a First Contact strategy that is obvious, recognizable, and consistent. Gentlemen! We are dealing with beings that think in the very long term. A thousand years to them are as a day. Why wouldn’t they broadcast their plans to all and sundry? Why does the lion roar? We are conditioned to think of war as a matter of stealth, because we live in an age when we can drop antimatter onto enemy airspace, and annihilate all life. But this is not war. This is a shepherd announcing to a wolfpack planet that we must either become his sheepdogs or be slain as vermin.”

Montrose disagreed. “But you’d think these—powers—would be smart enough to figure out that mutual cooperation is better than conquest!”

Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure, old friend. Of what benefit would have been the Aztecs to the Spanish Empire, had they flourished? Do you think our race is evolved enough to dwell in peaceful cooperation with these beings, these star-makers?”

Narcís D’Aragó said dispassionately, “Actually, Learned Del Azarchel, the mutual benefit is taken into account in the expression in the Theta Group of symbols. Look at these functions here and here—” Images of the Monument math, sine waves and hieroglyphs, appeared on the overhead screen, and next to them human math expressions, letters in Roman and Greek. “The sheepdog certainly benefits from being tamed by the shepherd, who looks to his care and feeding. The mutual benefit is merely not based on mutual consent.”

Reyes y Pastor said softly, “They could not ask for our consent in any case.”

Montrose barked, “Why not?”

Aloofly, Reyes y Pastor smiled. “To whom would the intellects of the Hyades Cluster address their inquiry? Suppose they sent a radio message yesterday. It would arrive one hundred fifty years from now. Suppose the generation at that time agreed to some proposal, entered into a contract or a covenant. In three hundred years the Hyades stars have their answer. They dispatch a ship moving, say, at one-tenth the speed of light. It arrives nine millennia of years from now—the same amount of time as divides us from the Mesolithic Era.”

He paused as if to savor the magnitude of the interval.

Then Reyes y Pastor continued: “Would our remote descendants actually be so honest and honorable that they would pay a debt the hunter-gatherer older than the Abel who first domesticated the ox had pledged? Or take possession of goods which the husbandman older than some Cain who gathered lentils and almonds in the Franchthi Cave in Argolid once contracted with the star-beings to buy, or the magician older than Enoch who painted shamanic images on the cave walls of Lascaux?”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or sat at the table like a black mountain, powerfully-built and with a voice to match, like a subterranean rumble: “Learned Montrose, from your speech—the speech of your otherself, I mean—we can conclude that this group of symbols, 113 through 151, in the Kappa area represented the racial intelligence quotient of the Hyades Cluster, measured by the amount of matter and energy in their environment they could reorganize to their use over time. You and the Xypotech machine compared it to world energy use, to global industrial output on Earth. You put us at four times ten to the twentieth power, at four exajoules per year; they—the Hyades Domination—ranked fourteen orders of magnitude above that, at around three hundred million yottajoules per year. I, that is, we did not necessarily agree with the idea of measuring intelligence by energy consumption, because the, ah, theoretical framework, that is to say … but you were not exactly in a position to discuss, uh, the details…”