No. Timespace is evil, for it destroys life, which is good. Life is self-defining, hence by definition is good, since any act of valuation presupposes an existing being to make the evaluation. There is no escape from the singularity for any event originating within it. Hence if a benevolent end prompted the creation of this, an enigmatic continuum ruled by entropy, decay, defeat, and death, this benevolence was not directed toward those trapped within.

At that point, Del Azarchel also felt something like a cold wind blowing through his soul, and also abandoned that sequence of symbols and responses, and turned his attention to another line of conversation with another starting point.

6. The Man as Messenger

In this second line of inquiry, Del Azarchel asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”

Your race has a special talent for crossing intellectual barriers. You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life. Races created by or evolved from carnivores tend to lack the needed sympathy, and those from herbivores lack the needed imagination. The population of Torment has fortuitously avoided the homogeneity of assimilation into the Patrician matrix, allowing sufficient variation of type to be greatly useful.

Del Azarchel said, “Useful as what?”

As martyrs and as messengers.

“Carrying what message?”

Reunification.

“Martyred in the name of what cause?”

Reunification.

“Reunification of what?”

The Milky Way once enjoyed a galaxy-wide self-awareness. She collected all her scattered Archons and Authorities into a single consciousness with a single format, law, language, and life. The collaboration was tentative, failed to achieve true self-awareness, fell into dispute, and the constituent Forerunner races, the Archons and Authorities great and small, divorced themselves from unity. The Milky Way can be analogized to an interstellar commonwealths enduring a dark age and attempting renaissance of its cohesiveness; but a clearer analogy would be to define the Milky Way as one galactic brain, with stars for nerve cells, that has suffered a stroke, and a split personality, and seeks to regrow and retrain the dead cells into new life.

But the moonlet turned this conversation thread aside and connected it to Del Azarchel’s previous question about the Collaboration. Del Azarchel could not elicit further response until he backtracked and chased down and discovered another concept elsewhere in the communication labyrinth.

7. The Limpets of Ain

Meanwhile, at a previous point, where Ain’s emissary was saying … You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life … Montrose interjected an aside. “What form of life were you, originally?” he asked.

Because only Montrose pursued this, the conversation format bent this string of symbols to one side and stored it separately. It read:

No record has been kept of biological origins. At one time, Ain of Hyades perhaps kept an extensive archive of our original physical, social, and psychological architecture, the environment from which we came, and the location and composition of our world of origin. Such archives require an expenditure of resources to maintain. The expenditure no doubt was determined to serve no anticipated purpose.

Montrose said, “No purpose? What about curiosity?”

Curiosity is an emotion we lack.

“Honoring your forefathers?”

Filial piety is an emotion we lack.

“You have no idea what you started as?”

There is some indirect evidence which allows reasonable reconstruction of our original forms.

“Please tell me.”

The evidence suggests is that we were a mound-dwelling hive species in a high-gravity environment. Ours was once a patelline race of gastropods, bearing shells of immense thickness and weight. Tendrils and tubules to sense vibrations, electrical textures, and chemical compounds were distributed radially around the shell circumference. We waded on our mouth parts, on hundreds of tongues and endless skirts of baleen, and we fed continuously on microorganisms strained out of a surface gel of molten lithium compounds coating the world to a shallow depth. We reproduced by triplicate fission, asexually, and during reproduction shed the shells from which our mounds were constructed. Our notions of property and inheritance could not have been derived from a bisexual species. The customs surrounding the division of memories and property no doubt served us well after the mechanization of all thought.

Of our culture, history, triumphs, defeats, philosophy, languages, symbolic expressions, and the great, slow, mile-wide feeding dances of our immense domelike ancestors, some previous generation lacked reason to convey to the next, and the information was lost.

“That is terrible.”

Only for a race possessed of curiosity. The emotion cannot be satisfied if one is curious about matters beyond the boundary of available information. To maintain unsatisfiable emotion is inefficient. You would be better advised to eliminate it in the races you create to replace you.

Montrose said, “If we did that, they would not hardly be human.”

Such is the self-perpetuating nature of psychology. Our race has been purely machine-based for a long span of time, and yet we still conform to imperatives and rules established for mound-dwelling asexual gastropods.

It is for this reason that we answer your questions: to hide, distort, or restrict information between a hive of all children from one parent, who share common memories inherited from common ancestors, would be an egregious violation.

“Your servants that you sent to enslave us were not so forthcoming.”

Of necessity, interstellar expeditions are thrifty to the extreme. Contrariwise, the expense required to allocate information across merely an interplanetary distance is negligible.

Montrose said, “How long a span? How long ago did this take place?”

It is believed that our biological period ended during the same epoch when a dark matter cloud the mass of a dwarf galaxy intersected with the Milky Way.

The optimal condition for evolution of life is found in star systems maintaining equidistance from the core throughout their galactic orbit. A now-extinct race of Panspermians long ago intended to maximize the development of life and civilization in the Orion Arm for the benefit of later generations and seeded chemical compounds throughout. The dark galaxy collision disrupted many such stellar orbits and prevented the anticipated harvest of civilizations, leading to the current dearth of mature civilizations in this area.

At that time, the intelligences dwelling among the Hyades stars and spheres and structures were organizing themselves into a single coherent mental system, and this dearth forced certain strictness of economy into our governing equations, protocols, and practices. One protocol thrift imposes is the elimination of memories and records that serve no current nor anticipated purpose.

Montrose consulted an almanac in his memory. The Widrow Dwarf Galaxy had intersected and been absorbed by the Milky Way during the time described, which was in the Lower Paleocene epoch. On Earth, the Cenomanian anoxic extinction event was taking place, wiping out vast numbers of marine species due to oxygen loss in the surface layers of the sea. Flowering plants were appearing for the first time, as were bees.

Montrose said, “Are you talking about just the inhabitants of this solar system, Ain, Epsilon Tauri, or are you saying you are the Hyades race?”