7. The Absolute Authority

“So we have to go to the bosses that own the Hyades, and get them to call it off. Five hundred fifty lightyears away!” he breathed, awed by the audacity of it. It would be a thousand years and more to go and return, even if the Hermetic could attain the night-to-lightspeed velocity her name boasted, and, more difficult, descend back into the metric of normal space at the destination.

Yet if the calculations were correct that the Armada approaching Earth from Hyades was loitering at one tenth of one percent of lightspeed, such a round trip was feasible. It could be made before the Solar System fell.

But Rania said, “The Dominion of Praesepe is of no significance.”

Montrose took a moment to adjust to that comment. The entities who controlled a large fraction of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. No significance.

“Then where are we going?”

“To the throne of the overlords of their overlords.”

“To M3? What then? We’re going to stoke the Hermetic to ramming speed, and blow the wogs to smithereens with a filthload of antimatter, right? Niven’s Law says that any ship with enough power to step on the toes of lightspeed, that ship has enough power to fry a planet like an egg. Yeah. That’d make a right shiny firework.”

She actually laughed. Rania threw back her head and laughed a silvery laugh, and her earrings sparkled in the darkness with the motion of her golden head. “Darling! You simply must read the decryption. This civilization … these godlike beings … they occupy a globular cluster.”

“Well, that don’t mean…”

“Messier Object Three is their seat. M3 is made up of several hundred thousand stars. The whole star cluster shifts like a variable even over the course of a single night: countless stars of the RR Lyrae type are crowded in the center, and they can double in brightness in a few hours. If you refer to the Zeta Segment, which contains star descriptions, the Monument says the output variation is a pollution or by-product of their stellar engineering efforts, Dyson spheres choking or releasing excess radiation. And what we see now is borne on lightwaves issued thirty-three thousand years ago. They may have achieved more by now.”

“What if we used Earth’s whole supply of contraterrene?”

“Earth? My husband, if the whole of the Diamond Star V 886 Centauri were flung like an anarchist’s bomb into the core of the cluster, the energy discharge would be less than what we see as differences of output in the cluster stars in a single evening. Blow up a planet? It would be like rushing into a country of several hundred thousand households and shooting one man.”

He opened his mouth to say that, in the cartoons, the Star Fleets were always rushing across to Lundmark’s Nebula or whereverthehell to blow up the enemy homeworld—but he realized how infantile that would sound, so he just said crossly: “So fine. Then there’s no point to going. It’s too far, anyway.”

“A gentler way is open to us.”

“What way?”

“To prove our case in the court of heaven for the freedom of Mankind.”

“Go to them? The ones who said in their message that they owned us?”

“I have read the message of the Monument, and seen the truth that it contains. Now you and I must go, armed only with that truth, and face the alien stars, the Archons of the Orion Arm, and demand of them we must be free.”

“Why would they free us?”

“Their own laws compel it. Look at the math: a method of determining, in the aggregate and in the long term, the efficient from the inefficient rules of behavior.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they will treat us like wolves if we are wolves to them, but like men if we prove ourselves their equals. These values allow us to escape their Concubine Vector. Their own sense of efficiency will not allow them to waste a valuable resource. Read! In the Cold Equations of the universe the balance scale weighs our utility to them as subjects, less the risk and cost of conquest, against our utility to them as partners, less the risk and cost of cooperation. They have reduced these complex matters, which so bedevil the governments of Earth, to an algorithm. If we act as their equals, they must recognize us.”

“And what does it mean to be their equals?”

“It means to be a starfaring race.”

8. Aren’t We Now?

“Well, hurrah! We made it! Uh—” He saw the look on her face. “Didn’t we?”

“No.”

“We went to V 886 Centauri and back.”

“No. The expedition was a failure. Can’t you see that? We were attacked—attacked as if by pirates, when the Hermetic returned—by our own world. Our arrival overturned the customs and governments, which should, by rights, have been waiting to protect us, to assure us of our property, and to encourage others to dream of like ventures. Men are not starfarers yet.”

Menelaus noticed the implication: that it would be a social change, an evolution in laws and traditions, which would make the human race starfarers. But what nation, what institution, could last so long?

He said only: “And what do we have to do?”

“Mankind has to learn to plan ahead a thousand years or ten thousand, and carry out our plans. To be a starfaring race means to think in the long-term. Space is too vast, the stars are too far, for small or selfish calculation! No race can starfare that cannot keep its purposes fixed and unchanging over long years of time; nor join the rulers of the stars who cannot keep contracts faithfully across long lightyears of space. The short-term races cannot be partners in covenants or voices in the galactic conversation, only serfs: for they have not the attention span.”

Menelaus was silent, wondering, turning over the figures in his mind.

M3 was 33,900 lightyears away. If a man who did not need to eat or sleep started counting the second he saw a ship traveling lightspeed depart for M3, and that tireless man uttered one number every second of the day and night, he would count to a trillion before that number would pass. Including leap years, it would be 31,688 years, 269 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds. He would still have over 3 millenniums to count. That was the one-way trip. Even at the theoretical maximum of nigh-to-lightspeed, assuming no turn-around time, the soonest a verdict could return from M3 to Earth would be 67,800 years from now.

Sixty-seven thousand eight hundred years.

The figure was stunning. A.D. 70800. That is the earliest anyone on Earth would hear about the verdict. The Seven Hundred Ninth Century.

Montrose tried to think of a comparison. When did the Egyptians build the pyramids? No. That was roughly 2500 B.C.: less than a twelfth of the span of time being completed here. The amount of time to go and return from M3 was equal to from now to the middle of the Paleolithic, circa 60000 B.C. About when the first canoe was dug and arrowheads shaped into leaf points by flint napping were both still new-fangled things the old folk probably didn’t cotton to, but all the rage amoung the cave-boys.

“It is too damn far. Why not send a radio signal instead? Coherent light does not disperse or lose energy in a vacuum.”

“That would prove only that we are a signal-making race, not a starfaring race.”

He looked at the star-map notation again, revisualized it in another form. He was rather pleased with himself that he could picture more than a million discrete points, representing stars, and their relation to each other in time and space, in his eidetic memory. But he was also a little disappointed: he had been expecting a difference in the nature of his thought, not just in the speed and complexity.

Augmented intelligence seemed a small enough thing when compared with the terrifying grandeur of outer space. If anything, the greater sensitivity of his thoughts allowed him to truly understand the magnitude of what hitherto had been too astronomically huge to be meaningful. No, he could actually feel it, grasp it, and to know how microscopic a mote man’s world was in the void.